Python's Performance

[Fredrik Lundh]

Paul Boddie wrote:

>> There are benchmarks testing the *real performance* of Python.
>>
>> For example: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602
>
> Just the observation that there are 166 comments to that article would
> suggest that the methodology employed was somewhat debatable. (I don't
> need to read them all - it is OSNews, after all.)
>
> As for the "real performance" of Python, what do we learn from these
> benchmarks which "...didn't test string manipulation, graphics, object
> creation and management (for object oriented languages), complex data
> structures, network access, database access, or any of the countless
> other things that go on in any non-trivial program"? That Python
> doesn't perform well executing loops involving mathematical operations?

fwiw, if you leave out the environments that compile to native machine code,
CPython is the fastest runtime in this floating-point benchmark:

    http://www.fourmilab.ch/fbench/fbench.html

(I recently translated some satellite navigation code from a Python prototype
to C, and was a bit surprised to find that I only got a 7x speedup...)

</F>