C vs BASIC Performance on RPi Pico

Been working on a BASIC port and did some comparison between ARMbasic and gcc

Sure there are Coremark numbers published by all chip vendors. But Coremark is copyrighted and takes a little configuring and only in C. Mine are not intended as an expansive benchmark, but as a quick test that can be implemented in a few minutes on nearly any device or language.

Floating point test

dim x as single
x=1000000
while x>1
  x=x/1.0001
  i=i+1  ' -- count iterations -- about 138K
loop

Integer test

i=1000000
while i
  i=i-1
loop

The same benchMark workload run as bare-metal C against the ARMbasic (which is compiled) on a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040, 125 MHz):

C edges BASIC by ~15–20 % on both loops. The float gap is similar to the integer gap, which means the BASIC float path isn't paying any large overhead beyond what the integer path already pays.

The C source for benchMark lives at CMSIS/benchMark.c — it does the same two loops the BASIC test does, times each with micros(), and prints the elapsed microseconds.