Speed Comparison Perl Python & C

[Dave Cole]

Cameron Laird wrote:
> In article <du7y8qlhbd1.fsf at amadeus.cc.tut.fi>,
> Ville Vainio  <ville at spammers.com> wrote:
> 			.
> 			.
> 			.
> 
>>query. Actually, Python code might even be faster in circumstances
>>like these, because you can write more sensible algorithms w/o
>>investing a week of debugging. So caching data in memory becomes more
>>appealing.
> 
> 			.
> 			.
> 			.
> Yup; I'm now sufficiently arrogant/provocative/confident/experienced/...
> to tell people to expect that their Python codings will be *faster* than
> what they achieve with C.

I can cite an example of this from my own experience.

My first implementation of the Sybase DB-API implemented most of the 
interface in C for speed.  I had only been using Python for a couple of 
weeks when I developed that version.  After a while I started to think 
about supporting array binding to fetch results from the server more 
than one row at a time.  The amount of work necessary to make the C code 
support array binding was more than I was prepared to undertake.

I wanted to support array binding so I decided to simply wrap the Sybase 
CT API and implement the DB-API in Python on top of the wrapping.  This 
was a huge win because I was able to implement a feature that would 
probably have been too hard in plain C (at least for my puny brain).

So I agree, in some (maybe even many) cases the Python implementation 
will be faster than the C implementation purely because of the increased 
sophistication of the solutions you are able to implement.

- Dave

-- 
http://www.object-craft.com.au