Directly converting Python to C using the C API

[Emmanuel Bengio]

I'm fairly new to the python world, and I often heard critics about it's
speed, and also about it's "non-compilability".
Then I thought, there is a complete C API that manages Python itself.
Would it be feasible to transform pure Python code into pure Python "C API"
code? It would spare the parsing time, which seems to be the an important
factor in Python's speed.


Given the following example:
x=0
for i in xrange(100000):
    x+=x*i

On my machine, this takes 79ms to run.

while this:
PyObject* x = PyInt_FromLong(0);
int i;
for (i=0;i<100000;i++)
{
    x=PyNumber_Add(x,PyNumber_Multiply(x,PyInt_FromLong(i)));
}
takes about 16 ms to run.

Any thoughts?

-- 


        Emmanuel Bengio
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