| When people say cpython is slow they are generally pointing to two things 1) The interpreter is _slow_ 2) You can't achieve real thread based parallelism I think in general people have a high level concept of (1) as static vs. dynamic and interpreted vs compiled is an understandable trade off. CPython as an implementation generally gets type casted as slow for its default dynamism which have understandable negative performance implications[1]. However CPython also gives you lots of ergonomic ways to push your program towards the static/compiled end of the spectrum with things like pandas/numpy/numba/extensions. In general using these correctly put you within the ballpark of _faster_ languages, could you write faster assembly by hand? Sure! Is optimizing in another language worth your time? I don't know. I've never really understood (2) the lack of threading as a problem, multi process parallelism can be accomplished fairly easily if you are CPU bound or projects like uvloop[2] make async tasks fast enough to compete with any web framework out there. Furthermore even though your cpu cycle cost may be levered to a considerable point while operating over hundreds/thousands of servers doing distributed computing right is still hard and developing something like celery/airflow/luigi/dask from scratch is not cheap either. Leaning on CPython's massive ecosystem can massively lower the barrier to entry in a lot of big problems. I think there are plenty of examples of re-writes in go[3]/rust[4] that have worked great for people, I have no doubt that python is _not_ the end all be all language, but I think the "python is slow" worry is generally overplayed. Specific problems require specific solutions, I'm glad Haskell seems to work for the author in genetic analysis but think this could have been a more interesting article with some specific python-haskell comparisons rather than the generic python is slow argument. [1] http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/05/09/why-python-is-slow/ [2] https://magic.io/blog/uvloop-blazing-fast-python-networking/ [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20170101002625/http://blog.parse... [4] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/inside-the-magic-pock... |