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There are a lot of people out there who interpret "Python is a slow language" as an attack, rather than just something that engineers need to know and account f

by jerf 3y ago

There are a lot of people out there who interpret "Python is a slow language" as an attack, rather than just something that engineers need to know and account for at solution time. There are also a non-trivial number of people out there who read about the constant stream of performance improvements and end up confusing that with absolute high performance; see also the people who think Javascript JITs mean Javascript is generally at C performance, because they've consumed too many microbenchmarks where it was competitive with C on this or that task, and got 500% faster on this and 800% faster on that, and don't know that in totality it's still on the order of 10x slower than C. It is, unfortunately, something that still needs to be pointed out.

melenaboija 3y ago
I am more of the idea that people that truly need performance already know about the differences of Python vs C and my experience with slow Python code is almost always due to lack of basic CS knowledge rather than the language per se. Maybe my comment was too mean, but every time that something related to Python core enhancements appears someone has to say that C is faster and I am not sure if someone interested on how the generated bytecode improves the performance needs to be reminded that C is faster.
- jerf 3y ago
  I write a lot of code in the "Python would be really chugging here, though it would get the job done if you put a bit of elbow grease into it, but Go chows right through this no problem with no special effort" space. I'm not generally in the "keeping 100 servers 90% occupied space" but it wouldn't take much more in percentage terms for me to fall off of Python. Python's slowness is definitely real, as well as its general difficulty in keeping multiple CPUs going. (Python has a lot of solutions to this problem precisely because none of them are really all that good, compared to language that is 1. compiled and 2. has a solid threading story. It wouldn't have many solutions if one of them was an actual solution to the problem.) It isn't just Python. I'm getting moved more into a PHP area right now, and there's a system in there that I need to analyze to see whether its performance problems are architectural, or if it's just not a task PHP should be doing and Go(/Rust/C#/Java/... Go is just the one of that set most in my and my team's toolbelt) would actually perform just fine. I don't know which it is yet, but based on what I know at the moment, both are plausible. And I'm not a "hater". I just have a clear view of the tradeoffs involved. There are many tasks for which Python is more power than one knows what to do with. Computers have gotten pretty fast.

by jerf 3y ago

melenaboija 3y ago

I am more of the idea that people that truly need performance already know about the differences of Python vs C and my experience with slow Python code is almost always due to lack of basic CS knowledge rather than the language per se. Maybe my comment was too mean, but every time that something related to Python core enhancements appears someone has to say that C is faster and I am not sure if someone interested on how the generated bytecode improves the performance needs to be reminded that C is faster.

jerf 3y ago
I write a lot of code in the "Python would be really chugging here, though it would get the job done if you put a bit of elbow grease into it, but Go chows right through this no problem with no special effort" space. I'm not generally in the "keeping 100 servers 90% occupied space" but it wouldn't take much more in percentage terms for me to fall off of Python. Python's slowness is definitely real, as well as its general difficulty in keeping multiple CPUs going. (Python has a lot of solutions to this problem precisely because none of them are really all that good, compared to language that is 1. compiled and 2. has a solid threading story. It wouldn't have many solutions if one of them was an actual solution to the problem.) It isn't just Python. I'm getting moved more into a PHP area right now, and there's a system in there that I need to analyze to see whether its performance problems are architectural, or if it's just not a task PHP should be doing and Go(/Rust/C#/Java/... Go is just the one of that set most in my and my team's toolbelt) would actually perform just fine. I don't know which it is yet, but based on what I know at the moment, both are plausible. And I'm not a "hater". I just have a clear view of the tradeoffs involved. There are many tasks for which Python is more power than one knows what to do with. Computers have gotten pretty fast.