this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Python

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Did you know it takes about 17,000 CPU instructions to print("Hello") in Python? And that it takes ~2 billion of them to import a module?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 6 months ago (3 children)

If i needed speed i wouldnt be programming in python.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

also, if I needed speed I wouldn't be printing stuff every 100k instructions

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If I needed speed, I'd be programming in Python but then profiling the performance and re-writing the inner loops and such to call C or BLAS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Surly u can use rust these days?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

In fact, Python is still decent even if you do need speed. We compared Python and Rust for algorithm processing, and we got similar-ish numbers when using numba. Rust was certainly faster, but we would need to retrain a lot of our team, and numba was plenty fast.

Python is fast enough, and if it's not, there are libraries to get it there.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 6 months ago

It's fine, I'm not in a hurry.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

so 200 to 800 microseconds on a modern cpu? Fast enough.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

While the processor I'm working on right now supports 14MIPS...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I doubt it's useful for performance evaluation, however, if you are writing a paper and want to compare your algorithm to an existing one, this can be handy

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Eh, maybe? It's probably only useful for large jumps, and timing is also probably good enough for that as well. With small jumps, instruction execution order matters, so a bigger number could very well be faster if it improves pipelining.

It's certainly interesting and maybe useful sometimes, but it's probably limited to people working on Python itself, not regular users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Just remember that an optimized C program will run about 100x faster then a similar Python program in a compute bound problem. So yes Python is slow but often good enough.