Lua is faster than Fortran???

[Stefan Behnel]

Felix, 09.07.2010 05:39:
> On Jul 4, 11:25 am, David Cournapeau wrote:
>> Well, I wish I did not have to use C, then :) For example, as a
>> contributor to numpy, it bothers me at a fundamental level that so
>> much of numpy is in C.
>
> This is something that I have been thinking about recently. Python has
> won quite a following in the scientific computing area, probably
> especially because of great libraries such as numpy, scipy, pytables
> etc. But it also seems python itself is falling further and further
> behind in terms of performance and parallel processing abilities.

Well, at least its "parallel processing abilities" are quite good actually. 
If you have really large computations, they usually run on more than one 
computer (not just more than one processor). So you can't really get around 
using something like MPI, in which case an additional threading layer is 
basically worthless, regardless of the language you use. For computations, 
threading keeps being highly overrated.

WRT a single machine, you should note that GPGPUs are a lot faster these 
days than even multi-core CPUs. And Python has pretty good support for 
GPUs, too.


> Of course all that can be fixed by writing C modules (e.g. with the help
> of cython), but that weakens the case for using python in the first
> place.

Not at all. Look at Sage, for example. It's attractive because it provides 
tons of functionality, all nicely glued together through a simple language 
that even non-programmers can use efficiently and effectively. And its use 
of Cython makes all of this easily extensible without crossing the gap of a 
language border.

Stefan