Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood

A related question is: why is Perl so fast? Quite a few years ago I wrote a little Runge-Kutta solver in Perl for some simulation work. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The equations of motion had to be integrated over a very long time, and it could take hours for a single run (still much faster than the Monte Carlo it was being used to do a sanity-check on). I re-wrote everything in C++, and picked…

Dynamic typing makes Python easier to use than C I disagree with the implications. The main reasons Python is easier to use is independent of type system. Not having to manually manage memory, for example! Overall it is a higher-level language, whereas C is designed for maximum performance. Dynamic typing is probably preferable to a 40 year old type system. But Python could be easier to use (catch bugs ahead of time!) and execute faster by adding a modern type…

>[boxed values...] The dynamic typing means that there are a lot more steps involved with any operation. This is a primary reason that Python is slow compared to C for operations on numerical data. Not exactly. Setting typecodes and vals doesn’t slow things down by many orders of magnitude. The main reason python is relatively slow is that there is no practical way to reason about what parts of program may be optimized out or leveled down to native datatypes…

Not because I want to limit discussions here, but this has been posted before on HN and there are many great comments in these threads. So, this comment is more of a useful suggestion, that if you are interested, check these comments out too (both 2+ years old). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8625280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7721096