[Python-Dev] PEP 510 (function specialization) rejected

[Nick Coghlan]

On 18 October 2017 at 06:25, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> It takes courage to admit failures like this! I think this is a good call.
> It echoes the experiences with Unladen Swallow and Pyston.
>

And Armin Rigo's experience with psyco before that.

Despite what people may think, CPython really isn't slow, given the large
> set of constraints on the implementation.
>

Antonio Cuni had a good PyPy presentation at EuroPython indirectly talking
about the fact that when folks say "Python is slow", what they often mean
is "Many of Python's conceptual abstractions come at a high runtime cost in
the reference implementation":
https://speakerdeck.com/antocuni/the-joy-of-pypy-jit-abstractions-for-free

That means the general language level performance pay-offs for alternative
implementations come from working out how to make the abstraction layers
cheaper, as experience shows that opt-in ahead-of-time techniques like
Cython, vectorisation, and binary extension modules can do a much better
job of dealing with the clearly identifiable low level performance
bottlenecks (Readers that aren't familiar with the concept may be
interested in [1] as a good recent example of the effectiveness of the
latter approach).

Cheers,
Nick.

[1]
https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/19/fixing-python-performance-with-rust.html

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20171018/c61ad737/attachment.html>