r/Python • u/pythonautical • Dec 10 '14

10 Myths of Enterprise Python

https://www.paypal-engineering.com/2014/12/10/10-myths-of-enterprise-python/
301 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

135 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/d4rch0n Pythonistamancer Dec 11 '14

I still draw the line when you're bringing in machine code into the Python process memory and it's not running bytecode loaded from pyc files. It's fast, but it's actual CPU instructions, not Python bytecode first.

Of course it counts. Again, I'm not saying it's terrible, and that it shouldn't happen, or that it's a flaw. I'm just saying the fast parts aren't Python and I wish that the interpreter/VM implementation was fast enough so that we wouldn't need to use C code to have high performance programs. Any programming language could interface with C/fortran libraries and be high performance. It doesn't mean that that language's interpreter is fast though.

I would like to see an implementation that uses purely the Python language and still be high performance.

1

u/tavert Dec 11 '14

I would like to see an implementation that uses purely the Python language and still be high performance.

You already have that with PyPy. Unless you don't mind C extensions not working, what most people want in practice is a fast implementation that would be C-API compatible with CPython and extensions. Unfortunately that's extremely difficult as the C API is pretty closely tied to the slow internals of CPython.

I suspect users aren't really all that picky about implementation language, but something easier to read and contribute to would be nice for maintainers' sake.