Impact of choosing a programming language on the OS performance

Question

Does choosing a programming language decide performance when all of it is compiled to some 1's and 0's

Eg: printf (in C) vs cout (C++) vs print (in Python)

Do all of the above have same binary compiled code ?

Appreciate any help in understanding this concept of programming language and role on hardware in detail! Thanks in advance

Answer 1

To what kind of binary code they are compiled depends on the compiler. For C and C++ there are dozens of different compilers which might generate different binary code. Besides that, most compilers even have optimization flags that influence the generated binary code a lot.

Python isn't even directly compiled into "machine code", it's compiled into bytecode for a python interpreter. The Python interpreter itself is a program that runs on the machine, then reads the python-bytecode and executes it probably by internally calling predefined functions (that already exist in machine-code)

Answer 2

The choice of programming language can have many impacts on the performance of your code, how portable it is, the comparability and among other things, how easily the objective can be put into code. To answer you question directly, C and C++ would likely produce the 'same binary' when printing an output, if they were both done for the same target environment. Python is different because it is an interpreted language, meaning the code is read by a program written in code native to the architecture and acted upon accordingly. Python is something of an edge case in this regard because it is technically compiled at execution time (and can be before distribution) but into an intermediate code similar in principle to Java byte code that is only understood by the Python interpreter.

The difference you bring up between lower language's like C and higher ones like Java, Python and even JavaScript is the nature of their execution being done by native hardware or by the interpreter. Language's running on bare metal are generally understood to be faster than those on interpreters as the interpreter takes time to understand the code and uses it's own system resources. Java tends to break this rule because it's interpreter is a full virtual machine that understands very simple byte code, making it competitive in speed to language's like C.