Function call overhead benchmarks with MATLAB, Octave, Python, Cython and C

摘要

We consider the overhead of function calls in the programming languagesMATLAB/Octave, Python, Cython and C. In many applications a function has to becalled very often inside a loop. One such application in numerical analysis isthe finite element method where integrals have to be computed on each elementin a loop. The called functions can often be evaluated efficiently but thefunction call itself may be time-consuming. We present a benchmark whose goalis to identify and quantify optimization potentials with respect to timeconsumption caused by function calls in the mentioned programming languages.