On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 4:33 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I don't think expecting people to tweak gc parameters when they witness > > performance problems is reasonable. > > What follows from that? To me, the natural conclusion is "people who > witness performance problems just need to despair, or accept them, as > they can't do anything about it", however, I don't think this is the > conclusion that you had in mind. > I can say with complete certainty that of the 20+ programmers I've had working for me, many who have used Python for 3+ years, not a single one would think to question the garbage collector if they observed the kind of quadratic time complexity I've demonstrated. This is not because they are stupid, but because they have only a vague idea that Python even has a garbage collector, never mind that it could be behaving badly for such innocuous looking code. Maybe we should consider more carefully before declaring the status quo sufficient. Average developers do allocate millions of objects in bursts and super-linear time complexity for such operations is not acceptable. Thankfully I am around to help my programmers work around such issues or else they'd be pushing to switch to Java, Ruby, C#, or whatever since Python was inexplicably "too slow" for "real work". This being open source, I'm certainly willing to help in the effort to do so, but not if potential solutions will be ruled out as being unnecessary. -Kevin
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