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From: geremy condra on 25 Jun 2010 20:08
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On 25/06/2010 22:25, Stephen Hansen wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Mark
>> Lawrence<breamoreboy(a)yahoo.co.uk>wrote:
>>
>>> On 25/06/2010 16:34, Stephen Hansen wrote:
>>>
>>>  Python's slow, sure. But its in practice fast enough for an extremely
>>>>
>>>> broad
>>>> range of activities.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> What?
>>>
>>
>> What, what?
>>
>> --S
>>
>>
>
> Python is *NOT* slow, you can develop software in it much faster than you
> can in some other languages.  The run time speed has also been shown to be
> faster in some circumstance than C because of the Bots who're smart enough
> to optimise it up to the hilt.

CPython is written in C. By definition it cannot go faster than C, and extensive
practice bears this out- the stdlib is full of modules either written
or rewritten in
C for speed, not to mention numpy, sage, etc. I'd also like to see the example
you cite- I have written Haskell that runs faster than C, and Forth that runs
faster than C, and I consider myself reasonably proficient at Python and have
*never* seen Python code that executes faster than comparably optimized C.

Geremy Condra
From: Nobody on 26 Jun 2010 07:11
On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:08:27 -0400, geremy condra wrote:

> I have written Haskell that runs faster than C, and Forth that runs
> faster than C,

Faster than *what* C, though?

With Haskell, there's seldom a significant performance hit for using
-fvia-C, so you would probably have been able to get comparable
performance using C.

The most common reason for Haskell to outperform C is due to lazy
evaluation, i.e. the C code evaluates things which it doesn't actually
need to.

From: geremy condra on 26 Jun 2010 07:55
On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 7:11 AM, Nobody <nobody(a)nowhere.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jun 2010 20:08:27 -0400, geremy condra wrote:
>
>> I have written Haskell that runs faster than C, and Forth that runs
>> faster than C,
>
> Faster than *what* C, though?

Well, than the C it was replacing, which is admittedly not much
of a claim. Having said that, it's a claim I can't make about
Python, which was why I brought it up in the first place.

> With Haskell, there's seldom a significant performance hit for using
> -fvia-C, so you would probably have been able to get comparable
> performance using C.

Probably eventually, but not without some fairly substantial work
on a section of code that was already pretty fast.

Geremy Condra
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