Is Python overhyped (just like Java)?

[Delaney, Timothy C (Timothy)]

> From: David Abrahams [mailto:dave at boost-consulting.com]
> 
> Alex Martelli <aleax at aleax.it> writes:
> 
> > Thanks to the excellent support given for these tasks by 
> the standard
> > library, the C++ source is ONLY twice as big as the Python 
> source for
> > the same job (a more usual ratio is around 5:1).  This 
> holds for both
> > the simplest versions, and the slightly more complicated ones with
> > somewhat better optimization.  The runtimes on my box 
> (Linux Mandrake
> > 9.0, gcc 3.1, Python 2.3) are, when the programs are run on 
> the 4.4 MB
> > of the "King James Bible" in plain ASCII text: 17.4 seconds for the
> > simplest C++, going down to 15 with optimizations; 11.2 seconds for
> > the simplest Python, going down to 8.1 with optimizations (CPU times
> > are in very similar ratios).  Of course, this basically reflects the
> > excellence of Python's intrinsics (dictionaries, lists, strings)
> > versus the lesser quality of C++'s library implementation (maps,
> > vectors, strings) -- with different implementations, you may see
> > different ratios.
> 
> Really?  Are you sure that time wasn't sunk into I/O?  "Read all the
> lines from a file" is a primitive in Python, but not in C++.
> 
> Also, it's only fair to point out that C++ doesn't have one library
> implementation -- each compiler comes with its own.  Which
> implementation(s) were you testing?  Oh, I see it was probably
> libstdc++ that comes with gcc 3.1.  Well, IIRC GCC-3.1 was well known
> to optimize poorly (it took them some time to figure out how to
> integrate all the new optimizations that came in with GCC-3, and they
> actually made things slower for a while), and I wouldn't exactly say
> that libstdc++ is the fastest implementation.

I think if you'll read the above, you will notice that Alex says exactly the same thing "...with different implementations, you may see different ratios."

Also, "read all the lines from a file" is not a primitive in Python - it's a method call ... *and* it is written in C. Obviously there could be as good an implementation in C++ on the same platform - whether there could be a *better* implementation is another question.

Tim Delaney