[bobsmooth]

What's with this fascination with making python fast? It's not supposed to be fast, it's supposed to be simple. If you want speed use a compiled language. Trying to make python fast is like trying to strap a turbocharger to a tricycle.

[alanwreath]

I agree with you -- but I also don't say no to free food.

I mean regardless of whether mypy was going to make my code run faster I would have used it for the shear confidence it gives wrt to my code correctness. The fact that I can use that same code (untouched) to speed it up... that's just means I get to have my cake and eat it too :P

[meadsteve]

Yeah this is exactly it for me. I already had type annotations and ran mypy to help with correctness. And I tried this out because it felt like a nice thing to get for free.

[pizza]

Python programming is simple because I the programmer have to do less stuff. But also, to a really really crude approximation, some asm that does less stuff is both simpler, and faster, than some asm that does more stuff (depends on what it is I'm doing in particular, but, it's a decent rule of thumb).

But there is a disconnect between Python programming simplicity and Python speed, which stems from the fact that under the hood Python is doing much more than its minimal asm 'spiritual equivalent'.

But in a pure abstract theory sense, it shouldn't "need" to. I don't really care about the intricacies of garbage collection or global interpreter lock or page misses etc - what if I just care about "can I make this nice idea into reality in 10 minutes". The reality is that I'm just barely working with the tip of an iceberg composed of 60+ years of computer abstractions. But who can blame me - I am but a mere mortal.

If we could have a programming language that is both simple for the programmer and simple for the computer, it would be great. It's not that unreasonable that people start from the user experience side - making a simple language faster, by getting rid of unnecessary work - rather than the opposite extreme: making it simpler to come up with optimal machine code whose simplicity withstand contact with hundreds of vestigial appendages that just have to be dealt w bc of computer history (spanning from how to do a syscall to how to make a gui in some particular os)

[nequo]

I can think of use cases in academic research for example.

Many pieces of code run only a handful times but potentially move a lot of data. Sometimes reimplementing existing code in C/Haskell/Rust, including finding equivalent libraries, writing tests, and debugging, only because the computation turned out to be heavier than I had expected is not a good use of time. If that’s the place where I’m at, PyPy, mypyc, etc., might just do the trick.