Python Speed Question and Opinion

[Donald 'Paddy' McCarthy]

Irmen de Jong wrote:

> djw wrote:
> 
>>> http://www.razorvine.net/python/PythonSpeed
> 
> 
>> I don't think I agree with your statement at the bottom that says "if 
>> all else fails, try Psyco." Since using Psyco is so effortless and may 
>> produce dramatic speedups, I would recommend to people that they try 
>> it before resorting to writing extension modules in C/C++. Sending 
>> people that are new to Python down the extension writing path may turn 
>> them off to Python altogether.
> 
> 
> I think you're right. So I changed the order a bit and removed the
> "if all else fails" :)
> 
> Feel free to add other suggestions to the page. It's a WIKI page after all.
> 
> --Irmen
Hi I read the page and think you have missed out a critical point: it is 
not the absolute speed that is important, you should think about what us 
an acceptable speed of execution. Optimisations beyond achieving this 
acceptable speed are wasteful of resources (your time).

Could we think of "speed" as being a coordinate system of (td,tr,tm)
where:
   td is the development time
   tr is the time to run the developed program
   tm is the time to maintain/modify/debug-once-released the program.

Then, comparing C/C++ with Python (spot the generalisations folks)
    td(C) is much greater than td(python)
    tr(C) is much less than tr(python)
    tm(C) is much greater than tm(python)

Cheers, Pad.