Speed of Python vs. Perl

[Paul Jackson]

Tim wrote
|> Talk someone into writing a patch; I've got no bandwidth to spare.

See another branch of this news thread for a patch (both 1.5.2
and 2.0 variants).

Me thinks this (getting startup time competitive with Perl) is
a hard problem, and that the two tweaks in my patch help, but
not greatly.

The combination of the dynamic nature of Python, with having
much of its run time library support loaded from Python code,
not compiled in, would seem to force Python to do upwards of
10 million instructions on startup.

I don't see anyway around this.
-- 
                          I won't rest till it's the best ...
                          Manager, Linux System Software
                          Paul Jackson <pj at sgi.com> 1.650.933.1373