Comparison of Prolog implementations

The following Comparison of Prolog implementations provides a reference for the relative feature sets and performance of different implementations of the Prolog computer programming language. A comprehensive discussion of the most significant Prolog systems is presented in an article published in the 50-years of Prolog anniversary issue of the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).

Portability
There are Prolog implementations that are radically different, with different syntax and different semantics (e.g. Visual Prolog) and sub-communities have developed around different implementations.

Code that strictly conforms to the ISO-Prolog core language is portable across ISO-compliant implementations. However, the ISO standard for modules is an extension which was not fully adopted in most Prolog systems.

Factors that can adversely affect portability include: use of bounded vs. unbounded integer arithmetic, additional types such as string objects, advanced numeric types (rationals, complex), feature extensions such as Unicode, threads, and tabling. Use of libraries unavailable in other implementations and library organisation: "Currently, the way predicates are spread over the libraries and system built-ins differs enormously. [...] Fortunately, there are only few cases where we find predicates with the same name but different semantics (e.g. )"

Benchmarks

 * Benchmarking issues: Odd Prolog benchmarking, Performance differences.
 * Benchmarking software: older, Dobry, Aquarius benchmark suite, (Bothe, 1990), (Demoen et al. 2001), benchmark descriptions
 * Benchmarking results: B-Prolog, SICStus, XSB, SICStus vs Yap vs
 * Benchmarking results: Survey of java prolog engines by Michael Zeising
 * Benchmarking results: OpenRuleBench yearly open-source benchmark of rule engines