MinGW and Python

[Edward Elliott]

Alex Martelli wrote:
> I believe the single figure is a useful summary.  Even the most
> sophisticated benchmarks are eventually boiled down to single figures,
> as in "so many SPECmarks" etc, because in everyday discourse a scalar is
> what you can reasonably discuss.  Sure, philosophically speaking it
> makes no sense to say that a compiler is better or worse than another at
> optimization, without adding a lawyer's brief worth of qualifications
                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
hey is that a shot at me? ;)

> each and every time.  In real life, it's a useful and practical
> temporary simplification, and engineers (as opposed to mathematicians
> and philosophers) have a bias towards practical usefulness.

I agree for benchmarks in general.  It's more this particular benchmark I
object to as not being representative.  It's like the difference between
SPECmark testing various CPU functions and Winstone measuring real-world
application performance.  If you're a CPU designer counting coup, SPECmark
matters.  For just about everyone else, Winstone tells you more.  And when
you're talking about small (less than an order of magnitude) differences in
SPECmark, platform/system/application issues becomes the dominant factor in
performance.  A CPU that's twice as fast won't help my i/o-bound server.

>From an engineering standpoint, the pybench number isn't that useful to me. 
It tells me little about the practical speed of my application on two
different python interpreters.  That's all I'm saying.  No need to sic the
philosophers on me (a fate I would not wish on my worst enemy). :)