Python Performance

[Skip Montanaro]

I got a bit confused attributing this message.  I think we have too many
Markus's running around loose... ;-)  I think I have the quoted text
attributed correctly.  Apologies if not.

    Stenberg> Yes that is much too slow. Good OO style requires a lot of
    Stenberg> function calls.  I'm sure Visualworks a commercial Smalltalk
    Stenberg> implementation can do millions of calls on this machine. Ok
    Stenberg> it's a JIT and it's commercial but's still Smalltalk and
    Stenberg> therefore at least as dynamic as python. I guess even Squeak
    Stenberg> (www.squeak.org) would be faster. If you would sent us code, I
    Stenberg> could prove it.

Better yet, since the Python source code is available, you could prove it by
speeding up the interpreter.  Many people have optimized different parts of
Python over the lifetime of the software.  It's significantly faster than it
was a couple years ago.

I think one of the impediments to improving the speed of the language has
been the dramatic performance improvement in hardware.  There's not a lot of
incentive to pour lots of time into speeding up method calls when for a few
hundred bucks you can simply drop in a faster processor, disk or networking
card.

    Kohler> P.S. This might surface as one example for 'why scripting
    Kohler> languages don't always cut it' in my master's thesis; if I have
    Kohler> made some grievous error(s?), corrections are welcome.

I don't recall anyone ever saying scripting languages would always cut it.

    Kohler> P.P.S. Too bad Python doesn't have anything that creates _nice_
    Kohler> code, like Stalin for Lisp ;-)

There is a substantially shorter history to Python than to Lisp.  Give it
time.  In addition, Lisp has been knocking around the academic world for
40-odd years.  With that many graduate students looking for a thesis topic,
it was likely that some of those theses would focus on performance
enhancement.

give-typewriters-to-enough-chimpanzees-and-you'll-get-Shakespeare-ly y'rs,

Skip Montanaro	| http://www.mojam.com/
skip at mojam.com  | http://www.musi-cal.com/~skip/
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