Early binding as an option

[Alain Ketterlin]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

[...]
> The only actual data I have on the subject is the perfect-numbers
> search the other day; Pike managed the same task in a fraction of the
> time that Python spent on it. Pike has a single integer type that
> quietly switches from small to large at 2**32, with a noticeable
> performance change. This is the same as Python 2, but could explain
> some of the Python 3 penalty. There's only two obvious possibilities
> (there may be others, of course): firstly, that the actual name lookup
> is expensive; and secondly, that Pike is able to optimize integer
> arithmetic by knowing that the value in question is an int, and it
> will never be anything else.

Pike is (at least partly) statically typed. Most of the lookups are
solved at compile time, and have therefore zero overhead at run-time. So
your second possibility is the good one, but probably not because of
arithmetic optims, rather because of all the lookups Pike doesn't
perform dynamically.

-- Alain.