[jfpuget]

Thank you, great comment, it spurred a great discussion.

Let me just clear one thing: I am not trying to represent Julia in any way. I wouldn't be legitimate for that at all. I tried to not write anything negative about the Julia language. Let me know if you think i did, in which case I'll modify my text.

To your point about compilers in charge of speeding up code, I see Numba doing more and more. I hope it will cover all of Python soon.

[Lanzaa]

I thought the article was good. It started with a basic premise, "Should we ditch Python and other languages in favor of Julia for technical computing?" Then the article shows several methods for speeding up python code to be faster than using julia. I was a little disappointed that pypy was not mentioned, but it is a good introduction to speeding up python code.

I think the flaw in the article is when it switches to answering, "did the Julia team [write] Python benchmarks the best way for Python?" Then it rewrites the fib implementation to use a cache, which makes the comparison to the julia version completely ridiculous. It also does all sorts of optimization which clearly deviated from the spirit of the benchmark, naive python vs naive julia.

I wish the conclusion had been written in a way that clearly answered the original premise, should we ditch python for julia? The article clearly showed that there are a lot of good ways to speed up python code. Looking for algorithmic complexity wins (like in the fib example), using cpython, using numba, and profiling all can be used to speed up python code to the level of naive julia code. Which leads to the conclusion, if all you want is faster code there is no need to ditch python for julia.

[jfpuget]

I agree that the first question is a very interesting one. I would be interested in the answer myself.

I made it clear however that I was going to answer a different question: did the Julia team wrote Python benchmarks the best way for Python?

That's all what the post is about: how to run Python code faster.

I will need way more Julia experience to be able to even think about answering the first question. The only thing I am 100% sure is that these micro benchmarks do not help answering that question.