[Mailman-Developers] python is slow

[Peter C. Norton]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2003 at 11:44:14PM +0100, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
> Eric Steven Raymond says in "The Art of Unix Programming" 
> 
> "Python cannot compete with C or C++ on raw execution speed 
> (though using a mixed-language strategy on today's fast 
> processors probably makes that relatively unimportant). 

Uhh... duh?  There isn't a scripting language out there that's faster
than C (I mean, there are things that scripting languages can *make*
faster, like preventing ppl from doing stupid sorts by only putting in
well-optimized sort algo's but that's not what most ppl mean by
"speed").  I can't believe ESR wrote that for python and not just for
scripting languages in general.

> In fact 
> it's generally thought to be the least efficient and slowest of 
> the major scripting languages, a price it pays for runtime type 
> polymorphism. 

Really?  I never thought that python was slower than, say, tcl prior
to 8.x.  I thought that the general concensus is that python and perl
are about neck-and-neck for the fastest possible interpreter.

But in short you're taking something written for popular consumption
instead of writing a test case in a few languages and seeing how fast
it runs.  That's not helpful at all.

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.