Python IS slow ! [was] Re: Python too slow for real world

[Greg Ewing]

Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> Is there any languge that is as easy to embed as Python, and also has
> full garbage collection?

Before I discovered Python, I played around with
Elk Scheme quite a lot. Its extension/embedding
interface is very nice - perhaps even nicer than
Python's, since there are no refcounts to lose
sleep over. And, like all Lisp/Scheme variants,
it has full GC.

I don't know how its speed compares with Python.
In principle, I imagine that a bytecoded Scheme 
implementation could be made somewhat faster than
Python, because Scheme isn't quite so pathologically
dynamic - global var references can be implemented
without requiring a dictionary lookup on every
access, for example. But then Scheme doesn't
have modules or classes as part of the core language,
so it's hard to compare them directly.

Greg