In article <[email protected]>,
Terry Reedy <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>I can imagine a day when code compiled from Python is routinely
>time-competitive with hand-written C.
I can't. Too much about the language is dynamic. The untyped variables
alone are a killer.
int a,b,c;
...
a = b + c;
In C, this compiles down to just a few machine instructions. In Python,
the values in the variables need to be examined *at run time* to determine
how to add them or if they can even be added at all. You'll never in
a million years get that down to just two or three machine cycles.
Yes, technically, the speed of a language depends on its implementation,
but the nature of the language constrains what you can do in an
implementation. Python the language is inherently slower than C the
language, no matter how much effort you put into the implementation. This
is generally true for all languages without strongly typed variables.
--
-Ed Falk, [email protected]
http://thespamdiaries.blogspot.com/
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