Comment by DeathArrow 5 days ago
I feel like Python should be much faster already. With all the big companies using Python and it's huge popularity I would have expected that a lot of money, work and research would be put into making Python faster and better.
Why?
There are other languages you can use to make stuff go fast. Python isn't for making stuff go fast. Its for rapid dev, and that advantage matters way more when you already are going to be slow due to waiting for network response
This has always confused me... is Python really that much better at rapid dev? I work on a Python project and every day I wish the people that started the project had chosen a different language that actually scaled well with the problem rather than Python, which they likely chose because it was for "rapid dev".
You can run Python processes in parallel for "scaling". Youtube and Uber run python backends. This is cheaper than developer time per hour.
Sure, there's multiprocessing, but historically no multithreading (relatively recently there is the free-threading interpreter). Each of those processes / threads will also execute slowly compared to most other languages. But we agree Python is not performance oriented... I'm just curious why people think it's a good trade-off when I suspect that writing the same code in say, Java, will take roughly the same time, be easier to maintain (compiler assisted refactoring, type safety, etc), and execute faster.
The Faster CPython project was from one of "the big companies" and did make significant progress with each version of Python, even if some of its more ambitious goals weren't met. The results of which you're seeing in the benchmarks in this blog post.