On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 11:00 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > Given a sufficiently advanced static analyser, PyPy could probably > special-case programs that do nothing. Then you're in a race to compare > the speed at which the PyPy runtime environment can start up and do > nothing, versus a stand-alone executable that has to start up and do > nothing. If this is a benchmark that people care about, I suggest they > need to get out more :-)
Like every benchmark, it has its uses. Just last week I was tinkering with several high level languages in order to see which one would start, do a fairly trivial task, and shut down, in the shortest space of time. Why? Because I wanted that trivial task to be added to our rapid-deployment sequence at a point where a human would be waiting on it, and the task itself wasn't critical (it was an early-catcher for a particular type of bug). Delaying my fellow developers by even one second at that point would be unacceptable; the various options at my disposal took anywhere from 250 to 750 ms (cold cache, which is what matters) to run. Yes, I know a second isn't long. But I was trying to sell a concept, and if I can say that it adds "practically no time" to an interactive action, that's a lot better than even one second. Considering that rapiding took about 1200ms (ish - again, cold cache) previously, adding even just 250ms is noticeable. Benchmarking an empty program would get very close to this actual real-world scenario. (Eventually I merged the functionality into an unrelated script just for the sake of saving on interpreter startup time.) ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
