MD5 in different programming languages

The MD5 algorithm, in different programming languages

The purpose of this page is to present timing results which can be more or
less compared. The MD5 algorithm does quite a bit of integer math and is
sufficiently complex to consume measurable amounts of time (some timings
were clocked with a loop and a watch - all have 2-digit precision).

June 2001 - New optimized entries (all are based on inlining):

31 ms in Perl 5.6.0, submitted by Doug Bagley, see doug2md5.pl
(replacing his previous 74 ms version, dougmd5.pl)
48 ms in Tcl, submitted by Miguel Sofer, see migmd5.tcl
270 ms in Python, submitted by Christian Tismer, see md5py.py

Note: Python's timings are due to unlimited-precision arithmetic, for a
hint that it could be in the 40..50 ms range, see ctmsg.txt and ctmd5.intpy.

(Latest Forth results as of Dec 18, 2000 are here)

   Language    Version     Time (ms)    Implementation

Linux SuSE 6.4 PIII/650:

   C           gcc 2.95.2      0.24     Portable compiled C

   iForth      1.11d           0.35     Native-code Forth [*]
   BigForth    1.22            1.5      Native-code Forth
   GForth      0.5.0          15        GCC-specific optimized C
   pForth      v21            59        Threaded VM in standard C
   Ficl        2.04           84        Threaded VM with C subr's

   Lua         4.0           150        Lua bytecode VM in C
   Tcl         8.4a2         180        Tcl bytecode VM in C
   Perl        5.005         230        Perl bytecode VM in C
   Python      2.0           460        Python bytecode VM in C

   [*] reported by Marcel Hendrix (modified, but still pure Forth)

MacOS 9.0.4 G3/300:

   Mops        4.01            2.9      Native-code Forth
   Tcl         8.4a2         380        Tcl bytecode VM in C

Notes

Timings are based on computing the MD5 hash of a string of 10,000 spaces
The C timings were done in Python 2.0, using the built-in module
The Forth and Python source code do not appear to be highly optimized
If you send me code and if I can run it, I will add the results to the list
Improvements to the code will be most gratefully acknowledged
This is not an attempt to "win" or "prove", but to explore and learn

References

Unofficial MD5 homepage - by Mordechai T. Abzug: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~mabzug1/cs/md5/md5.html
Language implementations - various authors: BigForth - GForth - iForth - Mops - pForth - and - Lua - Perl - Python - Tcl
Forth - by Fredrick W. Warren: md5.fth (from comp.lang.forth)
Lua - by Jean-Claude Wippler: md5calc.lua
Perl - by Alex Rousskov: http://www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/~rousskov/research/cache/sanitar/
Python - by Christian Tismer: pymd5.py (on this site, not elsewhere AFAIK)
Tcl - by Don Libes: http://expect.nist.gov/md5pure/

-- Jean-Claude Wippler <jcw at equi4.com>