The future of Python immutability

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:48:13 -0700, sturlamolden wrote:

> > Is the difference because of mutability versus immutability, or
> > because of C code in Numpy versus Matlab code? Are you comparing
> > bananas and pears?
> 
> It consisted of something like this


Your code does a lot of unnecessary work if you're just trying to 
demonstrate immutability is faster or slower than mutability. A simple 
test that just adds one to each element would have much less overhead.

In any case, there's no doubt that immutable objects require extra time 
to create compared to re-using an existing mutable object, and that time 
is probably O(N) (until you approach the limits of available contiguous 
memory, in which case you could see O(N**2) or worse behaviour). But an 
order of magnitude difference?


> I wasn't comparing bananas against pears. Mathworks informed me they
> were using my code to investigate why Matlab was showing such slow-
> downs. I am not sure what they found out, eventially. I have also
> wondered if immutability vs. mutability was the reason, as NumPy
> generates temporary arrays. But I have not found a better explanation
> either. Anyhow, ~30 seconds for Matlab vs. ~3 seconds for Python is a
> major difference.

How does Matlab speed compare to Python in general? Ruby, for example, is 
an order of magnitude slower than Python (at least it was last time I 
looked), not because of immutable arrays, but just because of the speed 
of the language.



-- 
Steven