The Computer Language Benchmarks Game compares measurements of programs written in different programming languages - the measurements are CPU time used, elapsed time used, memory used, and gzip source code used. There are 4 sets of up-to-date measurements - 4 different OS/machine combinations.
Anyone can contribute new programs that implement some of the dozen tiny tasks shown on the benchmarks game website. About 2500 programs have been contributed. Programs are re-measured as and when new versions of the language implementations become available, and between new programs and new language versions there have been new measurements most every week.
The Help page provides basic information and FAQ answers
Although the website is mostly bare facts about particular programs, categorised by programming language, there is one page of editorial comment
Quite unexpectedly, some of the tiny tasks shown on the benchmarks game website have become a resource for programming language researchers. For example -
Phaser Accumulators: a New Reduction Construct for Dynamic Parallelism www.cs.rice.edu 
Dynamic Interpretation for Dynamic Scripting Languages www.scss.tcd.ie
Race-free and Memory-safe Multithreading: Design and Implementation in Cyclone www.softlab.ntua.gr
Integrating Typed and Untyped Code in a Scripting Language moscova.inria.fr
Inline Caching Meets Quickening www.springerlink.com
Having a collection of programs that implement the same tasks in different programming languages is at least convenient. In Simon Peyton-Jones' pithy phrase - "flawed, but available".
Just as unexpectedly, the Go programming language distribution includes Go programs for the tiny tasks shown on the benchmarks game website, and those programs are compiled during install -
--- cd ../test/bench fasta reverse-complement nbody binary-tree binary-tree-freelist fannkuch fannkuch-parallel regex-dna regex-dna-parallel spectral-norm k-nucleotide k-nucleotide-parallel mandelbrot meteor-contest pidigits threadring chameneosredux
Similarly, the Scala project "automatically run a quick and dirty benchmarking suite over all our code revisions, in order to detect sudden changes in performance as a result of changes to the code" www.scala-lang.org
Several of the tiny tasks had already been used as benchmarks and were adopted almost unchanged for the benchmarks game, for example - fannkuch (now fannkuch-redux) and binary-trees.
Similarly, many of the tiny tasks from the benchmarks game have been adopted by other projects - notably 10 of the 26 Web Kit Sun Spider Java Script tests.
The benchmarks game sometimes seems a little like a Rorschach test for programmers - how they respond can be more interesting than the measurements. -- Isaac Gouy
"It has been said that Ruby is slow. The benchmarks from the Computer Language Benchmarks Game shows the various ruby implementations as ranking close to last. Benchmarks only tell a partial truth. The reality of the situation is that for the vast majority of situations the ruby interpreter is fast enough. Slow code is most likely your fault. In this article, I’ll be showing you a process by which you can take your slow ruby code and tune it to become as fast as it can be." p32 Carl Lerche, Write Fast Ruby: It’s All About the Science.
See original on c2.com