On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:35:23 -0800, Joel Davis wrote: > obviously the GIL is a major reason it's so slow.
No such "obviously" about it. There have been attempts to remove the GIL, and they lead to CPython becoming *slower*, not faster, for the still common case of single-core processors. And neither Jython nor IronPython have the GIL. Jython appears to scale slightly better than CPython, but for small data sets, is slower than CPython. IronPython varies greatly in performance, ranging from nearly twice as fast as CPython on some benchmarks to up to 6000 times slower! http://www.smallshire.org.uk/sufficientlysmall/2009/05/22/ironpython-2-0-and-jython-2-5-performance-compared-to-python-2-5/ http://ironpython-urls.blogspot.com/2009/05/python-jython-and-ironpython.html Blaming CPython's supposed slowness on the GIL is superficially plausible but doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The speed of an implementation depends on many factors, and it also depends on *what you measure* -- it is sheer nonsense to talk about "the" speed of an implementation. Different tasks run at different speeds, and there is no universal benchmark. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
