Perl code 37 times quickly than Python code??

[Andrew Dalke]

Garry Hodgson wrote:
>in my case, i'm
>parsing very large (gigabyte) files, and ocaml is doing so nicely
>(though it still takes a half an hour or so on a big sun machine).

Small promo here.  I'm developing Martel as a way to parse
bioinformatics data sets.  It's built on eGenix's mxTextTools, a
parse engine written as a C extension for Python.

 http://www.dalkescientific.com/Martel/

My 2+ year old laptop (233 MHz) parses the 220MB 'sprot38.dat' file
in times ranging from 2 minutes to 25 minutes, depending on how
much work is needed.
  http://www.dalkescientific.com/Martel/ebi-talk/img37.htm

Factor of 5 slower to reach a gigabyte.  Factor of 5 faster
performance for a new desktop machine.  Same ballpark as your numbers.

mxTextTools is amazingly fast.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at dalkescientific.com