[Python-Dev] 2.4 news reaches interesting places

[James Y Knight]

On Dec 9, 2004, at 1:31 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> Isn't it funny, by the way, that people don't go around talking about 
> how slow Jython is?  At least, I haven't seen it to the extent that 
> I've seen with CPython.

People talk about how slow CPython is, is because they are writing code 
targeted for it that traditionally would have been written in C. Python 
*is* slower than C. You can try to deny it, but it is simple fact. 
However, python is a really nice language to program in. So people use 
it anyways. It is "fast enough" for many things.

Nobody talks about how slow Jython is, because nobody(1) is writing 
entire programs in it. Jython is used as a way to script Java programs, 
and as such, it is pretty much completely unimportant how fast it runs.

Java has also traditionally got a lot of bad press for its lack of 
speed, and it was usually of the "not fast enough" variety, which is 
much worse than what's said of Python. However, a huge amount of 
progress has been made and Java really is quite speedy these days. It 
was not PR that made it faster, but hard work on the part of Sun.

There is currently a lot of work going on in the python community to 
make Python faster, which indicates both that Python is too slow for 
some people, and that it will be faster in the future. This is a good 
thing, and not something that should be shoved under the rug to try to 
pretend python is ultra mega super fast already.

James

1) Of course someone probably is, but you get the idea.