4 ms·

Isn't a lot of numpy implemented in C?

• chpatrick 12y ago
  Sure, but the point is that you can get some pretty nice speeds without writing any C yourself.
  • sampo 12y ago
    But only for operations that someone else has written the C code for you. If you come up with some new algorithm that cannot be reduced to operations already implemented in C, then you would need to write the fast C implementation yourself.
• buster 12y ago
  Python is implemented in C as well and it's still a dynamic language, which was the point here, i guess.
  • Dewie 12y ago
    There is a large difference between "implemented in C" (presumably talking about the runtime being implemented in C) and "Python that calls C code". If the implementation of Python is implemented in C as an interpreter#, then the interpreter is almost sure to be slower than whatever language/technology the interpreter was implemented with/on top of. This is pretty orthogonal to "Python that is implemented in <whatever>, and is doing most of the calculations via calling a C library". If you have a Python program that computes over megabytes of data, but it is calling a C library to do the heavy lifting, then the performance of Python itself is probably going to be negligible if 99.9% of the time is spent on the computation in the C code. # Though could be a VM or something.
• pekk 12y ago
  So what? Do you live in an alternative universe where you cannot use libraries implemented in C? Then you also cannot use, for example, Node.js (based on libuv).