[melbourne-pug] python slow, pypy fast

[Richard Jones]

On 30 May 2011 15:02, James Alford <mydnite1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Richard Jones <r1chardj0n3s at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 30 May 2011 14:48, James Alford <mydnite1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Pypy seems quite fast.  What I want to know is should you be aiming to
>>> develop python with pypy or should you really concentrate on python 3?
>>
>> Yes, pypy is really very fast for almost all benchmarks they throw at
>> it. Your question cannot be answered without knowing what you're
>> developing. Off the top of my head:
>>
>> - Does your application need serious performance using regular Python code?
>> - Can your performance critical bits be coded in C or cython?
>> - Do you need to use existing libraries?
>>
>> All of these questions will help you decide between python2, python3 and pypy.
>
> Sorry, I meant it as a general question.

But what I'm saying is there's no general answer.

Even though I'd love to I can't use Python 3 in my day job because of
the legacy codebase that needs to be migrated.

I can't use pypy for the website because it doesn't run Zope yet. We
don't need it there though because there's already C code making the
slow bits fast.

Nor can I use pypy for currently-slow analysis programs that need to
connect to Oracle, because the cx_Oracle module isn't available for
pypy yet. If I really cared about speeding those up I could probably
write some quick cython to do so.

We have one guy in our company using pypy because he does analysis of
data from other sources that he can happily slurp into a pypy program
and crunch in ten different ways.


     Richard