This is the code accompanying my blog post about implementing the game of Score4 (also known as Connect4). The goal of the game is to form horizontal, vertical or diagonal series of 4 of your chips (green). The computer tries to do the same, using red chips.

I coded implementations of the game engine in C, C++, OCaml, F#, C#, Lisp and Rust, using both functional and imperative styles of coding. Ports also came from all over the Web to many more languages (so far: Java, Python, Haskell, Go, D - see Hacker News discussion here and Reddit/programming discussion here). Update, March 2012: pypy did an amazing job optimizing the Python version, bringing it up to performance levels similar to the rest of them.

I also prepared a standalone windows binary of the game - using py2exe for the PyGame Python GUI, and a MinGW-compiled binary of the C version of the game engine.

To fiddle with the sources:

1. Checkout

2. Play or benchmark:

   • "make play" to play a graphics game of score4 (via PyGame)
   • "make playSimple" to play a console game of score4
   • "make benchmark" to benchmark the languages

3. The "make play" controls:

   • Click with mouse to drop a green chip on a column
   • ESCAPE to exit
   • SPACE to start a new game.

4. To run the benchmark in only one of the languages, e.g. OCaml...

   cd OCaml ; make ; make test

5. To benchmark in all available languages:

   make benchmark

These are the results I get on my Celeron E3400 under Arch Linux:

======================
= Running benchmarks =
======================
Benchmarking imperative memoized C++ ... 0.087 sec
Benchmarking imperative C++ ... 0.115 sec
Benchmarking imperative C ... 0.120 sec
Benchmarking imperative Lisp (SBCL) ... 0.272 sec
Benchmarking imperative LISP (CMUCL) ... 0.270 sec
Benchmarking imperative Java ... 0.385 sec
Benchmarking imperative OCaml ... 0.306 sec
Benchmarking imperative Python (Pypy) ... 0.638 sec
Benchmarking functional OCaml ... 0.693 sec
Benchmarking imperative C# ... 0.863 sec
Benchmarking imperative F# ... 0.792 sec
Benchmarking functional F# ... 1.958 sec

Update, 3 years later - Rust entered the game with furious speed ; it's almost as fast as the imperative group but the code is functional-style - ported from the OCaml version. CMUCL is gone, too (can't find it in Arch's repos anymore). Go and D are there too...

Results below from my MBair running Arch Linux:

Benchmarking imperative memoized C++ ...: 0.072000
Benchmarking imperative C ...: 0.085000
Benchmarking imperative C++ ...: 0.088000
Benchmarking imperative D ...: 0.139000
Benchmarking imperative Lisp (SBCL) ...: 0.143000
Benchmarking functional Rust ...: 0.155000
Benchmarking imperative Java ...: 0.220000
Benchmarking imperative OCaml ...: 0.230000
Benchmarking functional OCaml ...: 0.434000
Benchmarking imperative C# ...: 0.568000
Benchmarking imperative F# ...: 0.590000
Benchmarking imperative Go ...: 0.697000
Benchmarking functional F# ...: 1.295000

Update, 10 years later - benchmark re-run on a Celeron N5095 under Arch Linux. Note that running under the performance scheduler is important whenever one is benchmarking; as is making sure that your CPU is not throttling.

Benchmarking imperative memoized C++ ...: 0.058000
Benchmarking imperative C ...: 0.070000
Benchmarking imperative C++ ...: 0.071000
Benchmarking imperative Lisp (SBCL) ...: 0.119000
Benchmarking functional Rust ...: 0.126000
Benchmarking imperative D ...: 0.132000
Benchmarking imperative Java ...: 0.248000
Benchmarking imperative OCaml ...: 0.297000
Benchmarking functional OCaml ...: 0.444000
Benchmarking imperative Go ...: 0.491000
Benchmarking imperative C# ...: 0.617000
Benchmarking imperative F# ...: 0.693000
Benchmarking functional F# ...: 1.064000

These results were generated in December 2022, with the following compiler versions:

• GCC 12.2.0
• DMD 2.101.0
• SBCL 2.2.11
• rustc 1.65.0
• java 1.8.0_92 with HotSpot build 25.92-b14
• OCaml 4.14.0
• Mono C# 6.12.0.0
• F# Compiler v10.2.3 for F# 4.5