why is python slow?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Fernando Pereira <pereira at cis.upenn.edu>:
| On 3/7/02 9:41 PM, in article
| a2972632.0203071841.7cd09181 at posting.google.com, "les ander"
| <les_ander at yahoo.com> wrote:
|> i am just curious as to why different programming languages have different
|> speed. I understand that if a language has an extensive grammar
|> (such as c++) the compiler would take longer. But what about execution?

| You will not get a good answer to this from a newsgroup. No one can
| summarize for you what takes years of education and experience in
| programming language and implementation to learn. The only way to become
| informed on these questions is to study programming languages seriously.

That's true in general, but I wonder if all of Python's performance
problems are really so deep.  A few weeks ago someone posted some
performance measurements and, among other things, noted that version
2.2 took twice as long just to start up.  Did that appalling statistic
attract any investigation into the cause, or did anyone even try that
simple experiment themselves?  Is it true?  Is it news to the people
who released 2.2?  Is there any attention to performance there at all?

I believe I recall something similar in 2.0, due to a mistake in site.py
that was discovered during the beta releases.  Not a hard problem, just
one that wouldn't be noticed until someone wondered why performance
went downhill so fast.  We can wave our hands and say performance is a
tough problem, but it would be more convincing if it looked like it was
getting the most minimal attention.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu