> Further, I have an accounting software which was previously in java, but > now in python and the performance gain is ausom. > > Yes it depends on how we write the code but comparing the 2 at least at > the middle layer and front-end (pygtk) python is faster than java. > Infact I am most certain that swing is not even 50% as fast as pygtk or > pyqt.
Actually, pygtk and pyqt are mostly wrappers for c/c++ code (wrapping c/c++ is much easier in python than in java... so, that example ends up comparing java to c/c++ and not python). Java is usually faster in general (because of the many optimizations SUN did in the Java VM through many JIT techniques), although it has a slower startup time (which is a drawback of that same JIT), so, some applications can actually be faster in python just because of the faster startup time (like command line utilities), but for applications that keep running for more time, Java is usually faster -- even more if you don't use a mix of python and c/c++. Still, as you noted, if you take into account that you can rewrite your slow parts of the application in a faster language and just make python bindings for it, that advantage is largely diminished (while still having a fast startup time), and as you profile you can see that it's usually just 1% of the application that takes up 90% of the time. So, it's not a major drawback, and if you develop faster in python then it's worth it... (but I'd hardly say that rewriting from java to python will make it faster... if it becomes faster it's because you used better algorithms). Anyways, a program is usually faster/slower because of your choice of program structure and algorithms and not because of the speed of the language anyways. Cheers, Fabio -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
