[Python-Dev] FAT Python (lack of) performance (original) (raw)

Ryan Gonzalez rymg19 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 25 22:34:35 EST 2016

On January 25, 2016 9:32:07 PM CST, INADA Naoki <songofacandy at gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:

On Jan 25, 2016, at 18:21, INADA Naoki <songofacandy at gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm very interested in it. > > Ruby 2.2 and PHP 7 are faster than Python 2. > Python 3 is slower than Python 2.

Says who? For example, http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/php.html In Japanese, many people compares language performance by microbench like fibbonacci.

...does writing Fibonacci in a foreign language make a performance difference? Or did you mean "In Japan?"

That was certainly true in the 3.2 days, but nowadays, most things that differ seem to be faster in 3.x. Python is little faster than ever in these years. But PHP and Ruby are much more faster than these years. Matz announced Ruby 3x3. Ruby hackers will make more effort to optimize ruby. http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-engineering/2015/11/18/ruby-3x3 Maybe it's just the kinds of programs I write, but speedup in decoding UTF-8 that's usually ASCII (and then processing the decoded unicode when it's usually 1/4th the size), faster listcomps, and faster datetime seem to matter more than slower logging or slower imports. And that's just when running the same code; when you actually use new features, yield from is much faster than looping over yield; scandir blows away listdir; asyncio blows away asyncore or threading even harder; etc. I know. But people compares language speed by simple microbench like fibbonacci. They doesn't use listcomp or libraries to compare language speed. Maybe if you do different things, you have a different experience. But if you have a specific problem, you'd do a lot better to file specific bugs for that problem than to just hope that everything magically gets so much faster that your bottleneck no longer matters. I did it sometimes. But I'd like to base language performance like function call more faster.

> Performance is a attractive feature. Python 3 lacks it. When performance matters, people don't use Python 2, Ruby, or PHP, any more than they use Python 3. Or, rather, they use any of those languages for the 95% of their code that doesn't matter, and C (often through existing libraries like NumPy--and try to find a good equivalent of that for Ruby or PHP) for the 5% that does. In the case of Web devs, many people choose main language from PHP, Ruby and Python. When peformance matters, they choose sub language from node.js, Go and Scala. While performance is not a matter when choosing first language, slowest of three makes bad impression and people feel less attractive about Python.

-- Sent from my Nexus 5 with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

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