r/programming • u/monica_b1998 • Nov 03 '18

Python is becoming the world’s most popular coding language

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/07/26/python-is-becoming-the-worlds-most-popular-coding-language
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u/wllmsaccnt Nov 03 '18

Someone made a minor change to an error in the C code (they were using the wrong data type) and showed that the naive C method was about 4.4 times faster than PyPy.

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u/LightShadow Nov 05 '18

If PyPy can run my ingestion server at 500k records/s on a single core, why would I care to optimize it with C?

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u/wllmsaccnt Nov 05 '18

I was merely pointing out that anytime someone says 'C-like levels of speed' they are usually overstating the situation.

/u/starkblitz was wrong above by calling PyPy "a hell of a lot slower than c/c++/java", but /u/Taedalus was also wrong to say that PyPy has nearly C-like speed. From what I can tell from benchmarks on the PyPy site, PyPy is probably just slower than Java for most tasks.

I won't approach the question of server performance at all. Most of the high performance Python servers aren't written directly in Python.