[Python-Dev] 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[Andrew McGregor]

Well, for a lot of applications for Python, the performance that really  
counts is time from no code but a pile of data to code and processed  
data.  Python shines at that because nearly always the time to write  
the code dominates, so it doesn't matter what the run time is.

I wrote a little tool to translate a bunch of free data into scenery  
for the X-Plane flight simulator.  If I'd tried to do it in C, I'd  
still be debugging it, whereas I released it and the scenery I was  
building six months ago.  The run time of the C version would be, I  
speculate, about 5 times faster than the Python (given that psyco  
speeds it up about 8 times, and I would not have been so fancy with the  
algorithms in C).  But a 5x improvement on a 24 hour runtime is not 6  
months of improvement.

The other thing we can do is finish the portable backend for psyco and  
make it a standard module.  Then Python won't be slow, it will be  
compiled, and py2exe will be able to make a single-file executable.

Andrew

On 9/12/2004, at 11:18 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> I was pleasantly surprised to find a pointer to this article in a news
> digest that the ACM emails me regularly (ACM TechNews).
>
> http://gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/28026-1.html
>
> One thing that bugs me: the article says 3 or 4 times that Python is
> slow, each time with a refutation ("but it's so flexible", "but it's
> fast enough") but still, they sure seem to harp on the point. This is
> a PR issue that Python needs to fight -- any ideas?
>
> --  
> --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)
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