Speed Comparison Perl Python & C

Neil Hodgson nhodgson at bigpond.net.au
Mon Mar 1 16:18:09 EST 2004


beliavsky at aol.com:

> As others pointed out, your programs mostly test the speed of I/O.
> Here is a simple comparison of the speed of integer arithmetic using
> Python and Fortran 95 (Compaq Visual Fortran 6.6, with full
> optimization).

   It actually compares the speed of integers large enough to need 64 bits
of precision where Fortran can use a 64 bit integer and Python uses an
unbounded integer. The test can be sped up in two ways, first by using
floating point (which is fixed length in Python) and by using Psyco. On my
machine:

Original test: 245 seconds
Using floats: 148 seconds
Using psyco with integers: 69 seconds
Using psyco with floats: 18.4 seconds

   Therfore gaining a speed up of 13 times. This leads to Fortran likely
remaining 22 times faster.

from psyco.classes import *
import psyco

def xx():
    i = 1.0
    j = 0.0
    while i < 100000000.0:
       j = j + i
       i = i + 1
    print int(j)

psyco.profile()

xx()

   Neil





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