Performance Comparison of Shell Scripts vs high level interpreted langs (C#/Java/etc.)

Question

First - This is not meant to be a 'which is better, ignorant nonionic war thread'... But rather, I generally need help in making an architecture decision / argument to put forward to my boss.

Skipping the details - I simply just would love to know and find the results of anyone who has done some performance comparisons of Shell vs [Insert General Purpose Programming Language (interpreted) here), such as C# or Java...

Surprisingly, I have spent some time on Google on searching here to not find any of this data. Has anyone ever done these comparisons, in different use-cases; hitting a database like in a XYX # of loops doing different types of SQL (Oracle pref, but MSSQL would do) queries such as any of the CRUD ops - and also not hitting database and just regular 50k loop type comparison doing different types of calculations, and things of that nature?

In particular - for right now, I need to a comparison of hitting an Oracle DB from a shell script vs, lets say C# (again, any GPPL thats interpreted would be fine, even the higher level ones like Python). But I also need to know about standard programming calculations / instructions/etc...

Before you ask 'why not just write a quick test yourself? The answer is: I've been a Windows developer my whole life/career and have very limited knowledge of Shell scripting - not to mention *nix as a whole.... So asking the question on here from the more experienced guys would be grealty beneficial, not to mention time saving as we are in near perputual deadline crunch as it is ;).

Answer 1

Once upon a time, ye olde The Great Computer Language Shootout did include some shell scripts.

So, courtesy of the Internet Archive, from 2004 -

Note the shell scripts didn't have programs for many of the tests.

    Score Missing-Tests

Java 20     1

Perl 16     0

Python 16   0

gawk 12     6 

mawk 10     6 

bash 7      12  

Note shell scripts can sometimes be small and fast :-)

"Reverse a file"

        CPU (sec)   Mem (KB)    Lines Code

bash    0.0670      1464        1

C gcc   0.0810    4064        59

Python  0.3869    13160       6