[Types-sig] Type Inference I

[skaller]

Greg Stein wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 19 Dec 1999, skaller wrote:
> > Greg Stein wrote:
> >
> > > Bill Tutt and I have done it and measured about 30% speed improvement in
> > > most cases. Not as lot as most people would hope for, but definitely
> > > there. Bill is continuing to improve the code.
> >
> >       That's quite worthwhile, though.
> 
> Yup. But when people say "Python is 10X slower", then you want a 10X speed
> improvement to shut them up :-)

	To put it in context: I have a literate programming
tool, Interscript, written in Python. My problem isn't
that it is 10X too slow.

	It takes four hours to build itself, instead of
four seconds. For a more usual project, it would take
20 seconds, where less than a second is required.
In other words, it is something like 100x - 1000X too slow.
I know that other LP tools written in C can run that much
faster, because I have used them.

	The crux of the problem is in the character
by character handling which occurs in tight loops
that continually reallocate strings by appending
characters to them.

	I believe it is possible to compile
suitably written and annotated python so it
will run 100-1000X faster. 30% is worthwhile,
but 100000% is better :-)


-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au
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