* Steven D'Aprano:
On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:35:23 -0800, Joel Davis wrote:
obviously the GIL is a major reason it's so slow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Interpreter_Lock
Uh oh...
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
Hm, this seems religious.
Of course Python is slow: if you want speed, pay for it by complexity.
It so happens that I think CPython could have been significantly faster, but (1)
doing that would amount to creating a new implementation, say, C++Python <g>,
and (2) what for, really?, since CPU-intensive things should be offloaded to
other language code anyway.
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.
This also seems religious. It's like in Norway it became illegal to market lemon
soda, since umpteen years ago it's soda with lemon flavoring. This has to do
with the *origin* of the citric acid, whether natural or chemist's concoction,
no matter that it's the same chemical. So, some people think that it's wrong to
talk about interpreted languages, hey, it should be a "language designed for
interpretation", or better yet, "dynamic language", or bestest, "language with
dynamic flavor". And slow language, oh no, should be "language whose current
implementations are perceived as somewhat slow by some (well, all) people", but
of course, that's just silly.
Cheers,
- Alf
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