Slower than Python

[John Colvin]

On Saturday, 2 March 2013 at 15:43:57 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-03-02 at 10:33 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> […]
>> That conclusion would be hasty if not missing the whole point. 
>> You essentially measured the speed of one loop in various 
>> translators implementing various languages. Java code doing 
>> straight computation is on a par with C speed, no two ways 
>> about that. Python code using library primitives ain't no 
>> slouch either. Performance tuning in these languages becomes 
>> more difficult in larger applications where data layout, 
>> allocation, and indirect function calls start to dominate.
> […]
>
> Interestingly, there isn't only one Python implementation. 
> There is only
> one language but there is CPython, PyPy, Jython, IronPython, to 
> mention
> but 4.
>
> On computationally intensive code, PyPy (Python execution 
> environment in
> RPython) is generally 10 to 30 times faster than CPython (Python
> execution environment written in C).
>
> C is a (reasonably) well known and used language thought to 
> create fast
> code. RPython is Python but with some restrictions that is 
> statically
> compiled.  For writing interpreters, RPython spanks C. PyPy is 
> not the
> only language using RPython to implement the interpreter. C's 
> days in
> this game are seriously numbered.

I'm not sure that's entirely fair. PyPy is fast because it 
implements a JIT, not because it's written in RPython.