[Mailman-Developers] python is slow

[Bernhard Kuemel]

Larry Price wrote:
> That is not evidence, that is an appeal to authority.
> 
> If you wish to present evidence, you would need to drop a tarball
> containing.
> 
> a. a relatively complex test algorithm and data set
> b. implementations thereof in ${language}
> c. a test script which executes and times each implementation
> 
> You would then need to have a large sample of testers run the tests on a 
> wide variety of platforms, and then do a linear regression of the 
> results to see if speed varied independently of the underlying platform.
> 
> and yet it would still not matter.

You name the reasons why I will not produce the 'convincing 
evidence' Richard Barret is interested in. I do however believe 
ESR is called authority rightly and assume he is has sufficient 
knowledge of and communication with experts in the languages he 
writes about so his opinion adds to my experience that python is 
slow. Some complex things are hard to prove so I thought you 
might be interested in the opinion of a neural network trained in 
the subject.

> with few exceptions the problems that people use python to solve are not 
> ones where
> speed is paramount, but rather ones where understanding what's happening 
> and being able to change it quickly is.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Tuesday, December 16, 2003, at 02:44  PM, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
> 
>> Richard Barrett wrote:
>>
>>> On 25 Nov 2003, at 20:06, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
>>>
>>>> Maybe. However, I don't like python as on our old P60 server it 
>>>> burned up so much CPU time (15 s/min).
>>>
>>> It would be interesting to see you present convincing evidence that 
>>> Python runs slower than Perl which you seem happy to rely on.
>>
>>
>> Eric Steven Raymond says in "The Art of Unix Programming" 
>> (http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/index.html) on 
>> http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch14s04.html :
>>
>> "Python cannot compete with C or C++ on raw execution speed (though 
>> using a mixed-language strategy on today's fast processors probably 
>> makes that relatively unimportant). In fact it's generally thought to 
>> be the least efficient and slowest of the major scripting languages, a 
>> price it pays for runtime type polymorphism. By.
>> eware of rejecting Python on these grounds, however; most applications 
>> do not actually need better performance than Python offers, and even 
>> those that appear to are generally limited by external latencies such 
>> as network or disk waits that entirely swamp the effects of Python's 
>> interpretive overhead. Also, by way of compensation, Python is 
>> exceptionally easy to combine with C, so performance-critical Python 
>> modules can be readily translated into that language for substantial 
>> speed gains."
>>
>> Bernhard
>>
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>>
>>
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