How to make Python run as fast (or faster) than Julia

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 11:03 PM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 22/02/2018 10:59, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>>
>> https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jfp/entry/Python_Meets_Julia_Micro_Performance?lang=en
>
>
> While an interesting article on speed-up techniques, that seems to miss the
> point of benchmarks.
>
> On the fib(20) test, it suggests using this to get a 30,000 times speed-up:
>
>     from functools import lru_cache as cache
>
>     @cache(maxsize=None)
>     def fib_cache(n):
>         if n<2:
>             return n
>         return fib_cache(n-1)+fib_cache(n-2)
>
> The idea of the Fibonacci benchmark is to test how effectively an
> implementation manages large numbers of recursive function calls. Then,
> fib(36) would normally involve 48,315,633 calls.
>
> This version does only 37, giving a misleading impression.

Not overly misleading; the point of it is to show how trivially easy
it is to memoize a function in Python. For a fair comparison, I'd like
to see the equivalent Julia code: the function, unchanged, with
something around the outside of it to manage caching and memoization.
Can that be done with a couple of trivial lines of code using only the
standard library?

ChrisA