[Python-Dev] PEP 510 (function specialization) rejected (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Oct 18 02:25:29 EDT 2017

On 18 October 2017 at 06:25, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

It takes courage to admit failures like this! I think this is a good call. It echoes the experiences with Unladen Swallow and Pyston.

And Armin Rigo's experience with psyco before that.

Despite what people may think, CPython really isn't slow, given the large

set of constraints on the implementation.

Antonio Cuni had a good PyPy presentation at EuroPython indirectly talking about the fact that when folks say "Python is slow", what they often mean is "Many of Python's conceptual abstractions come at a high runtime cost in the reference implementation": https://speakerdeck.com/antocuni/the-joy-of-pypy-jit-abstractions-for-free

That means the general language level performance pay-offs for alternative implementations come from working out how to make the abstraction layers cheaper, as experience shows that opt-in ahead-of-time techniques like Cython, vectorisation, and binary extension modules can do a much better job of dealing with the clearly identifiable low level performance bottlenecks (Readers that aren't familiar with the concept may be interested in [1] as a good recent example of the effectiveness of the latter approach).

Cheers, Nick.

[1] https://blog.sentry.io/2016/10/19/fixing-python-performance-with-rust.html

-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20171018/c61ad737/attachment.html>

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