Performance

luish is meant to be as fast as dash, the fastest of the common POSIX shells, for scripts and sh -c.

bash and zsh are up to five times slower on the same scripts. What luish adds to dash (plugins, the interactive features, luish’s own options) is opt-in, and costs scripts nothing.

Scripts

These are the script benchmarks in the repository’s bench/ directory: scripts of a few hundred lines, each mixing parsing, expansion, function calls, built-ins and forks, rather than microbenchmarks. All the shells that run a benchmark print the same output for it.

Benchmark	What it does
arith	Mandelbrot set in fixed point, sieve of Eratosthenes, Collatz lengths
functions	Recursion (Hanoi, Fibonacci, Ackermann), wrappers, getopts in functions, a stack and a queue
strings	Pure-shell string processing: upper-casing, replacing, JSON and URL escaping, word frequencies
textproc	Generating and parsing an access log and an INI file with while read
configure	An autoconf-style configure script: many small forks, here-documents, sed
build	A make-like build that runs $SH -c for each object: fork, exec and shell startup
arrays	Not POSIX: sorting, a sieve, word counts, grouping, matrices, a search and slices, in indexed and associative arrays

The script and startup measurements on this page were made on 2026-10-05, with the release build of luish at git revision 9dc9b48 (pixi run release), on a laptop with an Intel Core i7-1260P (4 performance cores of 2 threads each, and 8 slower efficiency cores) running Ubuntu 26.04. Every measurement ran pinned to the same performance core (taskset -c 3), one at a time, with the desktop running. The other shells are Ubuntu’s dash 0.5.12, bash 5.3 (--posix) and BusyBox 1.37.0 (busybox sh, from the busybox-static package), and zsh 5.9 (--emulate sh) from conda-forge, as pinned in luish’s pixi.toml. Two complete runs of the script benchmarks gave times within 6% of each other for dash and luish (luish’s ratios within 0.06), and within 9% for the other shells.

Seconds (and the ratio to dash; lower is faster), mean of 40 runs (two runs of bench/run.sh -r 20):

Benchmark	dash	luish	bash	zsh	busybox
arith	0.267 (1.00)	0.172 (0.65)	0.709 (2.66)	0.432 (1.62)	0.352 (1.32)
functions	0.158 (1.00)	0.142 (0.90)	0.838 (5.30)	0.609 (3.85)	0.195 (1.23)
strings	0.206 (1.00)	0.194 (0.94)	0.681 (3.31)	0.536 (2.60)	0.303 (1.47)
textproc	0.164 (1.00)	0.165 (1.01)	0.418 (2.56)	0.483 (2.96)	0.238 (1.46)
configure	0.844 (1.00)	0.869 (1.03)	1.069 (1.27)	1.008 (1.19)	0.369 (0.44)*
build	1.157 (1.00)	1.212 (1.05)	1.286 (1.11)	1.276 (1.10)	0.167 (0.14)*

The first four run mostly inside the shell, where luish is as fast as dash, or faster. The next two spend most of their time starting programs, which luish does with the same system calls as dash; they take about 5% longer, mostly because luish itself starts more slowly and a command substitution costs more (below), and build starts a new shell for each file it compiles. Ubuntu 26.04’s cat, basename and other basic utilities are those of the Rust coreutils, which start in about 1.3 ms (to 0.4 ms for /bin/true), so these two take about twice as long for every shell as they did under Ubuntu 24.04, and the shell’s own share of their time is smaller.

* BusyBox’s times for configure and build don’t measure the same work: the static BusyBox runs its own versions of sed, cat, basename, dirname, rm and other utilities in the shell’s process instead of running the system’s programs (build runs 204 programs under it, to 834 under dash), and as a static program it starts faster. This counts for more with the slower utilities of Ubuntu 26.04.

arrays uses what zsh and bash scripts use beyond POSIX (arrays, associative arrays, [[ ... ]], ${x//pattern/replacement}, ${x:offset:length}), so dash and BusyBox can’t run it. Its ratios are to luish:

Benchmark	luish	bash	zsh
arrays	0.142 (1.00)	0.637 (4.47)	0.663 (4.65)

Startup and single commands

Mean of 1000 runs for the first two rows and of 20 for the others, each shell run with a cleared environment (only PATH, HOME and LC_ALL=C):

Benchmark	dash	luish	bash	zsh
sh -c true	0.34 ms	0.51 ms	0.55 ms	0.74 ms
sh -c /bin/true	0.66 ms	0.80 ms	0.85 ms	1.03 ms
while loop, 100,000 iterations of $((i+1))	86 ms	45 ms	193 ms	209 ms
Loop running /bin/true 3000 times	1.14 s	1.15 s	1.50 s	1.67 s
Loop running x=$(echo hi) 3000 times	0.30 s	0.35 s	0.62 s	0.49 s

Starting luish takes about 0.2 ms longer than dash, as luish is a larger program (5.5 MB, with the plugin support built in): it loads more libraries and touches more memory (170 page faults to dash’s 100). Starting a program costs about the same as in dash. A command substitution takes about 1.2 times as long as in dash: it makes the same system calls, but forking a larger process costs more.

Interactive startup

With cached startup files, a new interactive shell doesn’t run its startup files: it restores the state they left, as shell commands saved in a file. Here the startup files load nvm 0.39.7 (. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" in rc.d), and the saved state is 153 KB, with 110 functions. Mean of 100 runs, each started through env -i (which adds about 1 ms), measured on 2026-09-27 with luish 0.1.0 (git revision 76b9576), on a similar machine:

Run	luish	dash	bash	zsh -f
-c true (for comparison)	3.4 ms	3.0 ms	3.1 ms	3.1 ms
Sourcing nvm.sh, without the cache	20.7 ms	14.6 ms	27.9 ms	106 ms
Parsing the saved state (-n)	8.5 ms	5.2 ms	9.8 ms	11.8 ms
Running the saved state	8.9 ms	5.9 ms	11.2 ms	11.2 ms
An interactive shell (-i -c true), from the cache	8.2 ms

So an interactive shell with nvm set up starts in about 8 ms, however long the startup files take to run. nvm here has no version of Node installed; with a default version, nvm.sh also runs nvm use, and takes much longer, as do conda’s initialization and other scripts that run programs, while the cached state stays the same size.

luish parses large files more slowly than dash: nvm.sh (144 KB) takes about 4 ms to parse in luish and 2 ms in dash, which is most of the difference in sourcing it without the cache.

Commands in Rhai

A plugin can add commands written in Rhai (sh::builtin). bench/extensions/ has four commands written both ways, as luish shell functions (tasks.lsh, using local, arrays and associative arrays) and as an extension’s built-ins (ext.rhai), which must print the same output:

Task	What it does
collatz	One call: the number below 12,000 with the longest Collatz sequence (about a million loop iterations)
wordfreq	One call: counts the words of a 20,000-line file and finds the five most frequent (the shell reads it with while read, Rhai with fs::read_file)
urlencode	8,000 calls from a shell loop, each percent-encoding a 60-character string into REPLY (the shell function with a case table, not a $(printf) per character)
calls	300,000 calls from a shell loop of a command that adds two numbers into REPLY: the cost of a call

The fastest of 10 runs of bench/extensions/run.sh -r 10, on 2026-09-29, on a machine with 16 cores:

Task	Shell functions (ms)	Rhai built-ins (ms)	Shell / Rhai
collatz	834	380	2.2
wordfreq	550	189	2.9
urlencode	673	332	2.0
calls	472	758	0.6

Work inside a command (loops, arithmetic, strings, maps) runs two to three times as fast in Rhai. Rhai evaluates its syntax tree much as luish evaluates shell code, so the gain is not larger. A command that does almost nothing is faster as a shell function: calling into Rhai costs no more than calling a shell function (40,000 calls of an empty command added about 5 ms either way to a loop that took 47 ms), but each Rhai operation costs more than the shell expansion it replaces (parse_int twice, a string template and sh::setvar, against REPLY=$(( $1 + $2 ))). The first extension creates Rhai’s engine, once, which takes about 0.6 ms and 1 MB of memory (-c with plugin load of an empty extension, against true); compiling and running ext.rhai takes about 0.6 ms more.

Running the benchmarks

The benchmarks need pixi, and hyperfine if it is installed. In a checkout of luish:

pixi run bench                     # release build, then all benchmarks with every shell installed
bench/run.sh -n 4 -r 10 arith      # one benchmark, 4 times the work, 10 runs per shell

bench/README.md describes the options and the scripts. Absolute times depend on the machine and its load, so compare shells within one run. On a machine whose cores differ in speed (such as Intel’s performance and efficiency cores), pin the run to one core, such as taskset -c 3 bench/run.sh, so that every shell runs on the same one; and run one benchmark at a time. bench/extensions/run.sh runs the comparison of commands in Rhai with shell functions.