Is a "real" C-Python possible?

[Duncan Booth]

sturlamolden <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> wrote:

> On 9 Des, 23:34, Christian Heimes <li... at cheimes.de> wrote:
> 
>> >http://antoniocangiano.com/2007/11/28/holy-shmoly-ruby-19-smokes-pyth
>> >... 
>>
>> The Ruby developers are allowed to be proud. They were able to
>> optimize some aspects of the implementation to get one algorithm
>> about 14 times faster. That's good work. But why was it so slow in
>> the first place? 
> 
> The thing to notice here is that Congiano spent 31.5 seconds computing
> 36 Fibonacci numbers in Python and 11.9 seconds doing the same in
> Ruby. Those numbers are ridiculous! The only thing they prove is that
> Congiano should not be programming computers. Anyone getting such
> results should take a serious look at their algoritm instead of
> blaming the language. I don't care if it takes 31.5 seconds to compute
> 36 Fibonacci numbers in Python 2.5.1 with the dumbest possible
> algorithm.
> 
Quite so.

Take something like 
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/498110
and then modify the Python code from the "Ruby smokes Python" article by 
the addition of @memoize(3) to decorate the otherwise unchanged fib 
function: the Python runtime drops down to 0.002 seconds.

That is just slightly better than Ruby's 11.9 seconds although I'm sure the 
Ruby code would also gain as much from a memoize decorator.


from memoize import memoize

@memoize(3)
def fib(n):
   if n == 0 or n == 1:
      return n
   else:
      return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)

from time import clock
start = clock()
for i in range(36):
    print "n=%d => %d" % (i, fib(i))
print clock()-start


When I run this (with output directed to a file: I'm not trying to time 
windows console speed), the output is:

n=0 => 0
n=1 => 1
n=2 => 1
n=3 => 2
n=4 => 3
n=5 => 5
n=6 => 8
n=7 => 13
n=8 => 21
n=9 => 34
n=10 => 55
n=11 => 89
n=12 => 144
n=13 => 233
n=14 => 377
n=15 => 610
n=16 => 987
n=17 => 1597
n=18 => 2584
n=19 => 4181
n=20 => 6765
n=21 => 10946
n=22 => 17711
n=23 => 28657
n=24 => 46368
n=25 => 75025
n=26 => 121393
n=27 => 196418
n=28 => 317811
n=29 => 514229
n=30 => 832040
n=31 => 1346269
n=32 => 2178309
n=33 => 3524578
n=34 => 5702887
n=35 => 9227465
0.00226425425578