Steve Bergman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Anything written in a language that is > 20x slower (Perl, Python, > PHP) than C/C++ should be instantly rejected by users on those grounds > alone.
Well, if you time it starting from when you sit down at the computer and start programming, til when the sorted array is output, Python might be 20x faster than C/C++ and 100x faster than assembler. > I've challenged someone to beat the snippet of code below in C, C++, > or assembler, for reading in one million pairs of random floats and > sorting them by the second member of the pair. I'm not a master > Python programmer. Is there anything I could do to make this even > faster than it is? 1. Turn off the cyclic garbage collector during the operation since you will have no cyclic garbage. 2. See if there is a way to read the array directly (using something like the struct module or ctypes) rather than a pickle. 3. Use psyco and partition the array into several smaller ones with a quicksort-like partitioning step, then sort the smaller arrays in parallel using multiple processes, if you have a multicore CPU. 4. Write your sorting routine in C or assembler and call it through the C API. If the sorting step is a small part of a large program and the sort is using a lot of cpu, this is a good approach since for the other parts of the program you still get the safety and productivity gain of Python. > Also, if I try to write the resulting list of tuples back out to a > gdbm file, I don't understand what you're doing with gdbm. Just use a binary file. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
