[ynniv]

No, I'm in complete agreement with the OP, but you said

Python is slower than idiomatic C/C++ for solving comparable problems

And when io and especially network is involved, that is not true. Your efficient C code can't make up for time lost elsewhere in the system. No one is clamoring for curl to be rewritten in assembly.

[cwzwarich]

Is this really true? I have investigated a few performance / power problems caused by somebody using a bad networking API or using a networking API correctly, despite doing the same amount of I/O.

It is also more likely to be possible to use efficient platform-specific APIs for things like zero-copy I/O in C than in a scripting language.

[tptacek]

Zero-copy is often not actually a win; it's also uncommon in C code, too. The parent comment is right; I/O bound programs tend to do just as well in slow languages as in fast. It's true that language performance often doesn't matter, just like it's true that parser designs don't matter if you just use sexprs for everything.

[cwzwarich]

I disagree. I've measured it and it matters.

[tptacek]

For your data set.

[emn13]

For lots of data sets, and that includes many so-called I/O-bound datasets. Don't forget that a lot of I/O is very fast nowadays: if you're reading 100's of MB from the disk a second, you can't spend much time on the CPU processing each byte before the CPU becomes the bottle - you have on the order of 10-100 of clock cycles a byte, no more. Simple things like decoding utf-8 and checksumming can take a significant portion of this time, and that's before you're parsing anything. (Hence stuff like protocol buffers...)

If you're trying to make a fast program you obviously avoid too much expensive I/O. You can't avoid some latency, but you can often avoid a lot, and cache a lot, and place the rest closer to the consumer.

When you say I/O dominated, are you sure you don't mean: interactive website? Because I think the real saving grace there is that's it's OK for websites to be very slow - from the perspective of a CPU. It's not that the I/O needs to take a lot of time, it's that you have 100ms (and that's before ajax and relatives, which can hide even more latency), and you just don't need a lot of optimization to get into that restriction. And once you have, the difference between 100ms and 1ns just doesn't matter nearly as much; so sure, then you start to accept very inefficient I/O setups even though much more efficient ones could be readily available.

[tptacek]

True, but obvious.

[ynniv]

I hate to feed someone on a troll, but you started this off with "Python is much, much slower than C." This comment thread is sponsored by obvious.