[Baypiggies] Eric Raymond likes Python

[Stephen McInerney]

A fairer comparison might be comparing OCaml to Psycho.

Also, can Python do things that OCaml can't?

Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2009 13:30:27 -0700
Subject: Re: [Baypiggies] Eric Raymond likes Python
From: alecf at flett.org
To: spmcinerney at hotmail.com
CC: wescpy at gmail.com; baypiggies at python.org


Python performance sucks. Any single implentation of OCaml works much faster than any implentation of Python.
[anyone got any contemporary numbers?]
This is still true because OCaml (or any decent ML-oriented language implementation) is still on par with C for raw CPU-bound performance (in fact some OCaml code can be optimized much more than the transliterated C equivalent - i.e. you can often rely on the OCaml optimizer to speed up some abstractions/patterns more than you can rely on the C compiler optimizer for the same implementation pattern)

It's going to be hard to beat that with a dynamic language, but the unladen swallow folks should be improving this situation by at least producing faster code for particular abstractions/patterns...

But of course it's always a question of whether you're CPU bound or not!

Alec
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