[Python-Dev] Re: Pie-thon benchmarks

[Guido van Rossum]

> > You know, I *want* you to win, at least if you can win by a great
> > big margin.  Because then we could switch to Parrot to make Python
> > faster.  I just very much doubt that you'll be able to beat
> > CPython.
> 
> For this to be thinkable, and for the test to be
> fair, Parrot must be at least as semantically
> 'broad' as CPython (ie, handle every possible
> meaning of every bytecode).  So I would include at
> least the syntax and standard lib test files (-
> exec and eval tests) as part of the benchmark.
> This also gets to the 'provably correct' aspect of
> the rules.

Right.  I don't want to include the entire test suite, but I do want
to make sure the benchmark visits most dark corners of the language:
metaclasses, dynamically changing operator overloading, and the like.
I trust that Dan can write a VM that executes integer operations
faster than anyone, but that's not the point of Python.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)