[Python-ideas] Why CPython is still behind in performance for some widely used patterns ?

[Barry Warsaw]

Just to add another perspective, I find many "performance" problems in
the real world can often be attributed to factors other than the raw
speed of the CPython interpreter.  Yes, I'd love it if the interpreter
were faster, but in my experience a lot of other things dominate.  At
least they do provide low hanging fruit to attack first.

This can be anything from poorly written algorithms, a lack of
understanding about the way Python works, use of incorrect or
inefficient data structures, doing network accesses or other
unpredictable work at import time, etc.  The bottom line I think is that
you have to measure what you've got in production, and attack the
hotspots.  For example, I love and can't wait to use Python 3.7's `-X
importtime` flag to measure regressions in CLI start up times due to
unfortunate things appearing in module globals.

But there's something else that's very important to consider, which
rarely comes up in these discussions, and that's the developer's
productivity and programming experience.  One of the things that makes
Python so popular and effective I think, is that it scales well in the
human dimension, meaning that it's a great language for one person, a
small team, and scales all the way up to very large organizations.  I've
become convinced that things like type annotations helps immensely at
those upper human scales; a well annotated code base can help ramp up
developer productivity very quickly, and tools and IDEs are available
that help quite a bit with that.

This is often undervalued, but shouldn't be!  Moore's Law doesn't apply
to humans, and you can't effectively or cost efficiently scale up by
throwing more bodies at a project.  Python is one of the best languages
(and ecosystems!) that make the development experience fun, high
quality, and very efficient.

Cheers,
-Barry