How slow? (was Re: Python IS slow !)

[Markus Kohler]

>>>>> "Gordon" == Gordon McMillan <gmcm at hypernet.com> writes:

[deletia]
    Gordon> This thread is a bit unusual in being a general complaint,
    Gordon> based on measuring Python's function call overhead. Again,
    Gordon> there's some truth there, but it doesn't appear to be
    Gordon> based on a user's perception of slowness of an app.

Yes the problem is that the more you do in Python the more function call overhead
becomes the dominating factor for the performance of Python. Of course sometimes you 
can escape by using builtin functions or even write your own C
functions just to speed up things. 

I really don't want to be forced to do that because I would like to
write as much as possible in Python, just because it's so much more
productive and so much more fun.  

I was comparing it with a free Smalltalk implementation  (made by the
inventors of Smalltalk) because I think this is what the performance
should be. 

The squeak virtual machine is written in a (small)
subset of Smalltalk and is automatically translated to C. 
It's amazing to see that the resulting code is still faster than most
comparable scripting languages. 


Markus  
-- 
Markus Kohler  mailto:markus_kohler at hp.com