[Tutor] python, speed, game programming

[spir]

On 01/04/2014 02:38 AM, Keith Winston wrote:
> The thing that put me on edge was noticing that my simple
> Chutes & Ladders game doesn't go ANY faster on a machine that benchmarks
> perhaps 1000 times faster than another...

You could say this about most programs in most langs. Actually, some even 
regress in perf while harware progresses by orders of magnitude. This is due to 
the whole software platform (OS + layers of UI and graphics, plus underlying 
libs and frameworks, plus the ones your apps explicitely call) becoming more and 
more HW resource consuming, this independently of actual app logic processing.

As Alan evoked, I remember how early PCs were fast, retrospectively, with 
comparatively ridiculous HW resources (clock freq & live mem mainly). Resource 
consumptions of what I call here software platforms have progressed at a rythm 
comparable to HW resources. However, in general, there remain resource gains for 
apps, in absolute (rather than proportional) value. (But you can see that prop 
gains are not that important when running multiple heavy apps at once.)

Denis