Python and STL efficiency

[Peter Otten]

Licheng Fang wrote:

> Hi, I'm learning STL and I wrote some simple code to compare the
> efficiency of python and STL.

> I was using VC++.net and IDLE, respectively. I had expected C++ to be
> way faster. However, while the python code gave the result almost
> instantly, the C++ code took several seconds to run! Can somebody
> explain this to me? Or is there something wrong with my code?

Just a guess: immutable strings might be Python's advantage. Due to your
"benchmark"'s simplicity you end up with 10000 string instances in C++ and
just four str-s (and a lot of pointers) in Python.

What happens if you replace 'string' with 'const char *' in C++ ? 
(Note that this modification is a bit unfair to Python as it would not
detect equal strings in different memory locations)

Peter