Python IS slow ! [was] Re: Python too slow for real world

[Gordon McMillan]

Christian wrote:
 
> Markus Kohler wrote:
> <snip/>
> > Running pystone on HP-UX the result for 1.5.2c is 3.37% for malloc and
> > 3.95%
> > for free :-(
> 
> Are you absolutely sure? 

/snip snip/

I find Markus' numbers just-slightly-surprising. I don't find your 
numbers for Windows surprising at all. After all, there are some 
software companies who charge $800 or so for a drop in replacement, 
and claim 30-50% speed ups. Allowing for marketing-inflation, that's 
just about right.

(Actually, there are, or at least were, certain pathological cases
in which multithreading on a multiprocessor Windows box would slow
to a crawl because of poorly designed locking within malloc / free.) 

(And, in MS's defense, let me point out that their debugging versions 
are very nice - they let you track down rogue pointers / premature 
frees much faster than most other libs.)

- Gordon