[pypy-dev] My experience with PyPy

[Michael Sioutis]

Hello!

I haven't been following the list, cause I joined yesterday in order to
share my impressions
of PyPy here, so I don't know if these kinds of posts are frequent and
annoying.

I'm using PyPy the last few weeks in a qualitative spatial reasoner I am
developing. The speedup is up to
10 times over CPython, and it grows even more as the input size grows
bigger, but that's not what impressed
me the most, because I was expecting that.

You can find in my presentation
here<http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~sioutis/files/PyRCC8.pdf> at
slides 25 and 33 some comparison diagrams against C (red color) and C++
(blue color) implementations of analogous reasoners.
I am using different data structures and slightly modified algorithms, so
you should not consider that the comparison
diagrams is upon the exact same piece of code.
Long story short, you will find out that the pypy reasoner ranks in
positions 1 and 2 respectively, and I believe it will
also rank 1 in the second diagram if I grow the input even more (I
currently don't have enough memory and the C implementation
tops it at 900 nodes, so it would be unreasonable and unfair to run on my
own).

The impressive part of both diagrams is the scalability pypy offers me. It
starts slower than the statically compiled languages,
but the more you push the input sizes, the faster it goes compared to the
other two.

I started developing the reasoner in python not necessarily to be fast in
timings, but because I want to go beyond the state of the art in
qualitative spatial reasoning and present sth new, so python was the
language of choice to do it fast, in terms of working hours :)
This is future work, that will be based on the current reasoner.

*Thank you* for being patient, if you actually took the time to read my
story, and have a Merry Xmas!
Mike
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