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Missed a spot?Missed a spot?Posted Sep 2, 2008 8:17 UTC (Tue) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587)In reply to: Missed a spot? by jamesh Parent article: What's new in Python 2.6 This must be placed in context though: when compared to a language such as C++, Python is still quite slow for non-trivial things or things straying outside of the functionality present in C based modules. For real speed-ups a tool like Shed Skin is required.
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Missed a spot? Posted Sep 2, 2008 11:38 UTC (Tue) by MathFox (guest, #6104) [Link]
Python allows me to code the functionality I need three times as fast as C++... for a small runtime speed penalty. My programs are largely I/O bound (and use dynamic typing at places... which will tie Shed Skin in a knot.)
Missed a spot? Posted Sep 2, 2008 20:09 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
There is already Pyrex and Cython (a friendly fork of Pyrex that adds more features) for making optimized modules for Python.
http://wiki.cython.org/FAQ
So that stuff is more mature.
But simply taking Python, translate it to C++, then compile optimized binaries is a pretty damn neat trick.
What I am curious about, however, is how well shedskin works for programs that heavily use Python modules. Since Python is largely worthless, for it's current typical usage, without heavily relying on modules.
Missed a spot? Posted Sep 5, 2008 9:18 UTC (Fri) by srepmub (subscriber, #47230) [Link]
Currently, about 15 standard library modules are supported, such as re, math, random, collections and getopt. More will certainly follow (e.g. we have a datetime implementation in SVN), but this is a slow process, and it will always be limited to a relatively small subset of the standard library.
However, I don't think this is a really big problem in many cases, because in principle you can always generate extension modules ('shedskin -e'). This way, you get a potentially massive speedup for one or more speed-critical parts, while still being able to use arbitrary Python modules and dynamic constructs in the 'main' program. And everything is still in pure Python :)
Note that I don't think Shed Skin is the ultimate solution to improve Python performance. It's a cool toy that may be useful in certain cases, but what we really need is a good JIT, something that may come out of the PyPy project.
Mark Dufour (Shed Skin main author)
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