New Python User Question about Python.

[Will Ware]

Peter Hansen (peter at engcorp.com) wrote:
> An answer from a different point of view is "why bother?"
> Python is already "fast enough" for many applications -- one
> might even say "for most applications for which it is 
> used", and there is little interest in improving its
> speed compared to improvements in other areas.

This might be phrased a little differently. Python programmers are
not entirely unconcerned with speed. There are plenty of libraries
where internal are implemented in C (or for Jython, Java), and writing
C extensions is easy where such libraries don't yet exist.

Most cases where you want big performance improvements are situations
where a particular small set of operations is taking up most of the
time. If those operations are coded as a C extension, then you don't
need to rewrite the other stuff that is already debugged and working,
and you get all the benefits of staying in the Python environment.

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 22nd century: Esperanto, geodesic | Will Ware
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