[Python-Dev] 2.4 news reaches interesting places (original) (raw)

Paul Moore p.f.moore at gmail.com
Tue Dec 14 11:13:15 CET 2004

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004 01:05:09 -0200, Rodrigo Dias Arruda Senra <rsenra at acm.org> wrote:

But, but to the joke: I believe Python must strive to run at least as fast as the crowd -- Java, Perl, Ruby, Lua, Boo, etc

Maybe we could visit the language shootout sites, translate Python snipets to modern 2.4 idioms and rerun the test suites:

Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:

In the last couple of months, an acquaintance of mine has been trying out Python. He likes the language, particularly the support for character sets, but has (apparently) given up after benchmarking a typical (for him) task against Perl. The task is to use the "re" package to heavily modify a file by a sequence of re substitutions.

That might be a good idiom to review/translate/test. It's not a particularly natural thing to do in Python (REs are used much less in Python), but it's very natural in Perl, and a naive Perl->Python translation will make Python look slower. So a case study showing how you might "really" do a task like this in Python would be a useful resource.

Also, it might point to somewhere where there are opportunities for optimisation within Python (for some reason this reminds me of the mutable byte buffer discussions from a while back).

Paul

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