Python Performance

[Markus Kohler]

Skip Montanaro wrote:
> 
> I got a bit confused attributing this message.  I think we have too many
> Markus's running around loose... ;-)  I think I have the quoted text
> attributed correctly.  Apologies if not.
> 
>     Stenberg> Yes that is much too slow. Good OO style requires a lot of
>     Stenberg> function calls.  I'm sure Visualworks a commercial Smalltalk
>     Stenberg> implementation can do millions of calls on this machine. Ok
>     Stenberg> it's a JIT and it's commercial but's still Smalltalk and
>     Stenberg> therefore at least as dynamic as python. I guess even Squeak
>     Stenberg> (www.squeak.org) would be faster. If you would sent us code, I
>     Stenberg> could prove it.
> 

That's me (Markus Kohler). 

> Better yet, since the Python source code is available, you could prove it by
> speeding up the interpreter.  Many people have optimized different parts of
> Python over the lifetime of the software.  It's significantly faster than it
> was a couple years ago.
> 
> I think one of the impediments to improving the speed of the language has
> been the dramatic performance improvement in hardware.  There's not a lot of
> incentive to pour lots of time into speeding up method calls when for a few
> hundred bucks you can simply drop in a faster processor, disk or networking
> card.

Also it's true that hardware still improves, it's also true that if I would try
sell
an application to a customer with thousands of users and I would tell him to buy
a 
new machine because I use a slow interpreter, they would probably kill me. 
There are also applications where every second you save is worth a lot of many. 
Production testing of IC's comes to my mind ...

> 
>     Kohler> P.S. This might surface as one example for 'why scripting
>     Kohler> languages don't always cut it' in my master's thesis; if I have
>     Kohler> made some grievous error(s?), corrections are welcome.
> 
Even it was not me saying this I would still like to add a comment. 

> I don't recall anyone ever saying scripting languages would always cut it.

Agreed, but they should cut as much as possible shouldn't they ?

> 
>     Kohler> P.P.S. Too bad Python doesn't have anything that creates _nice_
>     Kohler> code, like Stalin for Lisp ;-)
> 
> There is a substantially shorter history to Python than to Lisp.  Give it
> time.  In addition, Lisp has been knocking around the academic world for
> 40-odd years.  With that many graduate students looking for a thesis topic,
> it was likely that some of those theses would focus on performance
> enhancement.

Yes there's hope that Python get's faster. I'm just want to avoid that people 
repeat history by just saying "by new hardware if it's to slow". 


Markus

-- 
Markus Kohler  mailto:markus_kohler at hp.com