Survival of the fittest

[Dieter Maurer]

Thomas Bartkus <thomasbartkus at comcast.net> writes on Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:06:56 -0500:
> ...
> We would be curious to know about those things you can do in C++
> but can't do in Python.

I implemented an incremental search engine in Python.

It worked fine for large quite specific "and" queries (it
was faster than a C implemented search engine).

However, for large "or" queries, it was by two orders of magnitude
slower then the C competitor.

I had to move my implementation to C. Now my search engine is
almost always (significantly) faster and when it is slower,
the difference is negligeable.


We learn: a C/C++ implementation can in some cases be drastically
more efficient than a Python one.

My special case was that almost all my data were integers
and the C implementation could exploit this fact -- unlike the Python one.

--
Dieter