[so-cal-schemer]

Here's a better gauge for code density:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

How source-code size is measured

We start with the source-code markup you can see, remove comments, remove duplicate whitespace characters, and then apply minimum GZip compression. The measurement is the size in bytes of that GZip compressed source-code file.

Thanks to Brian Hurt for the idea of using size of compressed source-code instead of lines of code.

  median
  February 2025
  ===============
  Toit        558
  Perl        570
  Lua         580
  PHP         581
  Ruby        583
  Python 3    585
  Julia       634
  Chapel      646
  Racket      696
  JavaScript  698
  OCaml       741
  Erlang      798
  Go          831
  Dart        847
  Smalltalk   871
  Haskell     892
  Java        910
  Lisp        938
  Swift       939
  F#          943
  Pascal      959
  Fortran    1091
  C#         1117
  C          1121
  C++        1129
  Rust       1235
  Ada        1825

[mrsmrtss]

The Benchmarks Game has some highly optimized implementations and is not a good representation of typical code. Some languages allow you to go a lot lower than others if needed, which adds verbosity, that does not mean typical code must be verbose. There are things possible in C# that you just can't do in Java, for example. That does not mean typical Java code is more concise than C#. On the contrary, typical C# would be probably considerably more "dense".

[igouy]

> … is not a good representation of typical code.

afaict that's unknown and "typical" weasel word and median.

[so-cal-schemer]

Good points.

There is a trade-off.

Outside hotspots, readability / maintainability should take precedence.