My earlier post PythonJS now faster than CPython struck a nerve with the Python community, and some heated debate on Hacker News. The fact is that CPython is embarrassingly slow compared to V8, and the adoption rate of Python3 is very slow compared to JavaScript's explosive growth.
As pointed out by a few people in Hacker News thread, my first benchmarks were performed with PyPy1.9, so I have updated the test runner to use the latest PyPy 2.3.1 and PyPy1.9. I have also removed the micro-benchmarks, and now only include benchmarks from the Unladen Swallow test suite.
PythonJS (with the fast-backend) is faster than CPython in four of the following five benchmarks. Some may argue that this is not a fair comparison because the fast-backend is only a subset of the Python language standard. Keep in mind that: 1. it is large and useful subset, and 2. PythonJS is designed to allow you to mix both modes with in the same script by blocking out code as fully compliant or fast using special with blocks or calling pythonjs.configure.
nbody
pystone
richards
fannkuch
float
Python has some big problems not just speed, like running on mobile devices. Translation to JavaScript, and other targets like: C++ and Rust, make it possible to side step the Python interpreter and that makes deployment much simpler.
No comments:
Post a Comment