On Sep 2, 9:45 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > [snip code] > > Thanks for that. I realise that improving the algorithm will speed > things up. I wanted to know why my less than perfect algorithm was so > much slower in python than exactly the same algorithm in C. Even when > turning off gcc's optimiser with the -O0 flag, the C version is still > > > > > 100 times quicker.- Hide quoted text - > > - Show quoted text - Maybe Python is the slowest programming language in the world. So there is a joke: some python hater said that "python" can only crawl rather than run. :)
Python is slow because: (1) dynamic binding (2) it is a interpretation language For example, in C code, an interger expression "a+b" will directly generate an assembly code "add" for x86 processors. A python interpreter, on the other side, need detect the type of a and b first, then choose the right "+" operation for them and use a evaluation stack to get the result. Psyco is a JIT compiler with just in time specialization which can somehow solve these two problems -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
