Performances of Pyhton programs

[Roy Smith]

bairef2 at cti.ecp.fr (François Baire) wrote:
> Are there any benchmark or does anoyone know what are the performances of a 
> program written in python (in terms of CPU and RAM) compared with other 
> languages (especially C++ and compiled languages) ?
>    I've met many articles which explain that python programs are slowler 
> because it uses the interpreter, but none says how much slower it is ! I 
> would like to know this for a rather big OO program which uses standard 
> fonctions of the language.

There is little doubt that a program written in C/C++ will be faster than 
the same algorithm implemented in Python (or any of the common "scripting" 
languages such as Perl or TCL).  How much slower depends to a very large 
degree on exactly what you're doing.

I've got one program in Python which is probably 100x slower than a C 
version because it does a huge amount of low-level string manipulation 
(building up strings character by character) which is exactly the wrong 
thing to be doing in Python.  When I profile it, over 99% of the CPU time 
is spent in the string module.  But, that means it takes 3 seconds to run 
instead of a fraction of a second, and it saved me days of development time.

On the other hand, I've written Python database applications which 
essentially ran at the same speed as a C version would because all the hard 
work was really being done inside Oracle.

You might want to check out http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ for a few 
random datapoints.