[Python-Dev] Optimization targets (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Thu Apr 15 10:27:17 EDT 2004

> http://starship.python.net/crew/mwh/hacks/speeding-python.html

I recently met Mario Wolczko who worked on the Self language, and asked him if he had one sentence of advice for Python. His response was: Just-in-time compilation.

About psyco: I think it's wonderful. But, you are right, nobody is using it. Why? Simple: It's not 'on' by default.

I don't think that's the real reason. Last week Jimmy Retzlaff gave a talk at the Bay Piggies meeting on optimization, using a large commercial application he's written as an example. He mentioned that he had tried to use Psyco, and that it had been turned on in some distributions of the code, but that it was currently turned off again.

I don't recall the reason he stated for that, but I suspect that it was mostly Psyco's memory bloat, plus the fact that his code was "fast enough" and he was able to code things in C if needed. (He also showed a nice anecdote about Psyco being faster than his hand-coded C in one case, but that didn't last long when he realized the C code was using doubles and the Python code was using ints. :-)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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