Speed-up for loops

[BartC]

"David Cournapeau" <cournape at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.546.1283897932.29448.python-list at python.org...
> On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 8:28 PM, BartC <bartc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> One order of magnitude (say 10-20x slower) wouldn't be so bad. That's
>> what
>> you might expect for a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
>
> 10/20x slower than C is only reached by extremely well optimized
> dynamic languages. It would be a tremendous achievement. If that's

Well, that is what I do (mess around with languages and stuff).

Getting back to the OP's code again (trivial and pointless as it might
seem), I got these results:

C (gcc 3.4.5 -O3)     0.8 secs
C (DMC-o)             2.3 secs
C (lccwin32 -O)       2.9 secs
My last interpreter  12.6 secs dynamically typed language
               (or    4.5 secs when told the type of 'a'; but that's
cheating a little..)
Python 3            177.0 secs

That's why I was questioning the latter's performance in for-loops. But now
that I know a bit more about Python (having dynamic everything) the figure
is not so surprising. However, it's still slow!

> what you are after, look at LUA with its JIT, or scheme + stalin.

I've seen LuaJIT in action. It's timing for this test is 1.5 secs: forget 
being only 10x slower than C, it's faster than some C versions! (I'm sure it 
must be cheating somewhere...)

-- 
bartc