Python Written in C?

[Warren Myers]

The OO overheads for C++ are almost non-existent.
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1192024&ns=15058

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Dan Upton <upton at virginia.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 1:21 PM, Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
> <bj_666 at gmx.net> wrote:
>> On Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:12:54 +0200, mk wrote:
>>
>>> Seriously, though, would there be any advantage in re-implementing
>>> Python in e.g. C++?
>>>
>>> Not that current implementation is bad, anything but, but if you're not
>>> careful, the fact that lists are implemented as C arrays can bite your
>>> rear from time to time (it recently bit mine while using lxml). Suppose
>>> C++ re-implementation used some other data structure (like linked list,
>>> possibly with twists like having an array containing pointers to 1st
>>> linked list elements to speed lookups up), which would be a bit slower
>>> on average perhaps, but it would behave better re deletion?
>
> Aside (actual reply below): at least for a sorted LL, you're basically
> describing Henriksen's algorithm.  They can asymptotically be faster,
> based on amortized analysis, but they're somewhat more complicated to
> implement.
>
>>
>> An operation that most people avoid because of the penalty of "shifting
>> down" all elements after the deleted one.  Pythonistas tend to build new
>> lists without unwanted elements instead.  I can't even remember when I
>> deleted something from a list in the past.
>>
>> Ciao,
>>        Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch
>
> The other side of the equation though is the OO-overhead for C++
> programs as compared to C.  (A couple years ago we used an
> instrumentation tool to check the instruction count for a simple hello
> world program written in C (ie, main(){printf("Hello world!"); return
> 0;}) and Python (main(){cout<<"hello world"<<endl;return 0;}), and the
> instruction count was significantly higher for C++.  I expect any sort
> of C++ objects you used to implement Python structures will be slower
> than the equivalent in C.  So even if writing it in C++ would reduce
> the overhead for deleting from a list, I expect you would lose a lot
> more.
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>



-- 

Warren Myers
http://warrenmyers.com