[kamaal]

>>I know Perl had many efficiencies built in, and was considered quite fast at some point (90s?).

There are a lot of threads in Perlmonks that talk in detail about speeding up Perl, related project et al.

To be summarizing it. Languages like Perl and Python are slow because they do a lot of work out of the box that languages like C don't. There fore when you talk of talk of translating Python to C, or Perl to C. Essentially what you are talking of is translating all that extra action back into C, which will run as fast as Perl or Python itself.

The more you make it easy for the compiler to interpret the faster it can run and vice versa.

Python is slow for the very reason its famous, its easy for the programmer.

[pjmlp]

Lisp and Smalltalk like languages run circles around Python and Perl performance.

Enjoy the same powerful features, have JIT and AOT compilers to native code.

It all boils down to how much the language designers care about performance.

[infinite8s]

And also how much the language designers care about proper language design.

[sbov]

I'm not sure if this really answers the question though. There are plenty of languages that do more work than C does that are not as slow as python. Do they do less work than python? Maybe, but they certainly do more work than C. The question is, even if they do less work than python, is the extra work python doing valuable to you?

[dkersten]

Lua is almost as dynamic and flexible as Python and is very easy for the programmer. LuaJIT's performance is close to that of C.

[nameless912]

I think part of the reason for this, though, is that Lua is a very "thin" language. It purposefully doesn't have a lot of fancy features (I mean, come on, it literally has one composite datatype, and you're supposed to use them [tables] for everything from arrays to maps to full objects). By removing a lot of assumptions that make Python "easy", Lua has made it much easier to write optimizing JITers and compilers since runtime behavior is (perhaps a little paradoxically) easier to predict. And it doesn't make Lua any less "easy" a language, it's just a different set of rules to follow. Guido's hunt for the simplest programming language possible is noble, but sometimes it causes poor decisions to be made imho.