python on the smalltalk VM

[Carlos Ribeiro]

At 23:03 19/04/01 +0100, Michael Hudson wrote:
>Douglas Alan <nessus at mit.edu> writes:
>
> > After many years of research, they came up with a compiler for Self
> > that would generate code that runs about one half to one third the
> > speed of compiled C code.  This is 30 to 50 times faster than
> > Python.
>
>No it isn't.  At least, not for me.  Generally I find that fairly
>optimized C modules are about 40-60 times faster than really optimized
>Python (I'm better at Python than C).  Obviously "it depends", but
>I've found these numbers to be fairly consistent over a variety of
>tasks.

For all reasonable applications that I can think of, 30-50 compared to 
40-60 is about the same (at least is the same order of magnitude). What is 
not clear to me if Doug's number is Python x C or Python x "optimized Self".

Anyway, what really surprises me is the magnitude of the difference between 
C and Python. It does make sense to have a big difference - interpreted 
languages will always be slower - but the higher level of abstraction in 
Python should allow for a smaller difference. It brings the question: how 
are these numbers measured? For some applications (such as text file 
processing) I doubt that the difference could be so big, specially if you 
know how to optimize your Python code.


Carlos Ribeiro