Paul Boddie wrote: > Steven Bethard wrote: > > David Rasmussen wrote: > > Faster than assembly? LOL... :) > > > Faster than physics? ;-) > > > I think the claim goes something along the lines of "assembly is so > hard > > to get right that if you can automatically generate it from a HLL, > not > > only will it be more likely to be correct, it will be more likely to > be > > fast because the code generator can provide the appropriate > optimizations". > > > I think this is just a restatement of existing motivations for using > high-level languages and compilers. My impression is that PyPy takes > inspiration from work which showed that run-time knowledge can > sometimes produce code that is better optimised than that produced by > a > compiler. > > That said, when everyone starts showing off their favourite > benchmarks, > it might be more interesting not to parade some festival of arithmetic > yet again. Where more recent versions of the Java virtual machines > have > improved is in their handling of object memory allocation, amongst > other things, and merely scoffing that Java is slow (by pulling > specific/specialised extension packages out of the hat) fails to > acknowledge the potential for similar improvements (and others) in > Python, especially where programs involving plain objects - as opposed > to numbers, and where no conveniently available and wrapped C/C++ > package exists for the task - are concerned. > > Paul
For example, binary trees http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=binarytrees&lang=all -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
