Christian Heimes, 05.03.2013 18:05:
today I came across this slides https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-are-slow by Alex Gaynor. The slides aren't some random rants on Python. Alex makes some valid points.
I just read through them. I'm ok with the first part, but when it comes to the "why it's really slow" section, I get the impression that Alex has misunderstood something about Python (and maybe programming languages in general). There's no need to make "dynamic languages" C-ish, and why should they be? We'll always be using more than one language for what we do, and that's neither good nor bad, just normal. For the few cases (more than 5%? Anyone?) where you really need to do zero-copy-whatever stuff or other low-level-I-really-know-what-I-am-doing-kind-of-things, you can just write them in a language that fits your use case and that allows you to do exactly the kind of zero-copy or bits-here-and-there or immutable data structures operations you need. That may or may not be C. It may be Fortran, it may be Lua, it may be Haskell, it may be Lisp. It depends on what you know and what you need. CPython has a well established reputation as an extremely good and easy to use integration platform, and that's its main selling point. Let's keep using it like that. Stefan