N-Body Performance With a kD-Tree: Comparing Rust to Other Languages

This paper presents the results of a more representative N-body benchmark utilizing a kD-tree implemented in multiple languages. We find that while Rust is slightly slower than C or C++ for smaller simulations, it is the fastest language for simulations at the scale we use in actual research. On the other hand, Go is constantly 1.5-2x slower than Rust. The JVM is competitive with Go for intermediate-size simulations but struggles when we reach one million particles. As expected, scripting languages are the slowest, though it is rather remarkable how much slower Python is than Node.js. Also surprising is that our attempts to speed up the Python implementation using NumPy made it significantly slower.