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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Jan 27 06:16:19 EST 2016

On 27 January 2016 at 03:35, Sven R. Kunze <srkunze at mail.de> wrote:

I completely agree with INADA.

It's like saying, because a specific crossroad features a higher accident rate, people need to change their driving behavior. No! People won't change and it's not necessary either. The crossroad needs to be changed to be safer.

Umm, no, that's not how this works - developers contribute to community driven projects for their own reasons. Nobody gets to tell them what to do unless they're paying them.

Micro-optimising a poor algorithm won't deliver macro level improvements because macro level code uses things like space-speed trade-offs to improve the algorithmic efficiency (as in the example of applying functools.lru_cache to a naive recursive fibonacci implementation).

Victor's work on FAT optimiser is interesting because it offers opportunities to speed up even code that is already algorithmically efficient, as well as making CPython a better platform for experimenting with those kinds of changes.

More generally though, much larger opportunities for improvement lie in persuading people to stop writing code, and instead spending more of their time on finding and assembling code other people have already written into solutions to interesting problems. That's the kind of improvement that turns enormously complex problems like facial recognition into 25 line Python scripts: https://realpython.com/blog/python/face-recognition-with-python/

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia

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