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Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#351
post #82
post #27

I hope it doesn't get stuck at 3.14, like TeX. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditDayOf/comments/7we430/donald_...

You hope it doesn't ? > [Donald Knuth] firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features This is such a breath of fresh air in a world where everything is considered obsolete after like 3 years. Our industry has a disease, an insatiable hunger for newness over completeness or correctness . There's no reason we can't…

Worth noting that few people use the TeX executable as specified by Knuth. Even putting aside the shift to pdf instead of dvi output, LaTeX requires an extended TeX executable with features not part of the Knuth specification from 1988.

Btw, equations and polynomials while conceptually are old, our contemporary notation is much younger, dating to the 16th century, and many aspects of mathematical notation are younger still.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#353
post #343

More than 300 comments here and still no convincing answer. Why the community wastes time on trying to make CPython faster when there is pypy which is already much faster? I understand pypy lacks libraries and feature parity with up to date CPython. But… can’t everyone refocus the efforts and just move to pypy to add all the missing bits and then just continue with pypy as the “official python”? Are there any serious…

> can’t everyone refocus the efforts You have answered your own question. Seriously, though. PyPy is 2-3 versions behind CPython (3.11 vs 3.14) and it's not even 100% compatible with 3.11. Libraries such as psycopg and lxml are not fully supported. It's a hard sell.

But this is exactly my point. The resources pypy has are much smaller. And still for years they managed to follow up being just 2-3 versions behind with features and high on performance.

So why not move all the resources from CPython to close the gap with features faster and replace CPython entirely?

Since this is not happening I expect there to be serious reasons, but I fail to see them. This is what I ask for.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#354
post #343

More than 300 comments here and still no convincing answer. Why the community wastes time on trying to make CPython faster when there is pypy which is already much faster? I understand pypy lacks libraries and feature parity with up to date CPython. But… can’t everyone refocus the efforts and just move to pypy to add all the missing bits and then just continue with pypy as the “official python”? Are there any serious…

> pypy which is already much faster It isn't.

Yes it is.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#356
post #21

Every time I hear news about Python language itself, it sadden me that, in 2025, PyPy is still a separate distinct track from mainline Python. That said, I wonder if GIL-less Python will one day enable GIL-less C FFI? That would be a big win that Python needs.

I don't understand why C FFI is that popular.

The amount of time it takes spent to write all the cffi stuff is the same amount it takes to write an executable in C and call it from python.

The only time cffi is useful is if you want to have that code be dynamic, which is a very niche use case.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#357
post #343

More than 300 comments here and still no convincing answer. Why the community wastes time on trying to make CPython faster when there is pypy which is already much faster? I understand pypy lacks libraries and feature parity with up to date CPython. But… can’t everyone refocus the efforts and just move to pypy to add all the missing bits and then just continue with pypy as the “official python”? Are there any serious…

> pypy which is already much faster It isn't.

For all my applications, going to PyPy was an instant 2x improvement.

Not only that, it is a lot easier to hack on. I might be biased, but the whole implementstion idea of PyPy seems a lot more sane.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#358

Please don’t make benchmarks with timing inside the loop creating a sum. Just time the loop and divide by the number. Stuff happens getting the time and the jitter can mess with results.

The real world benchmark is measuring it from invocation, both for cold launches and 'hot' (data cached from the last run).

Interestingly I might have only ever used the time (shell) builtin command. GNU's time measuring command prints a bunch of other performance stats as well.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#359
post #82
post #27

I hope it doesn't get stuck at 3.14, like TeX. https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditDayOf/comments/7we430/donald_...

You hope it doesn't ? > [Donald Knuth] firmly believes that having an unchanged system that will produce the same output now and in the future is more important than introducing new features This is such a breath of fresh air in a world where everything is considered obsolete after like 3 years. Our industry has a disease, an insatiable hunger for newness over completeness or correctness . There's no reason we can't…

This philosophy may have its place in some communities, but Python is definitely not one of them.

Even C/C++ introduces breaking changes from time to time (after decades of deprecation though).

There’s no practical reason why Python should commit to a 100+ year code stability, as all that comes at a price.

Having said that, Python 2 -> 3 is a textbook example of how not to do these things.

Re: Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it?

#360
post #343

More than 300 comments here and still no convincing answer. Why the community wastes time on trying to make CPython faster when there is pypy which is already much faster? I understand pypy lacks libraries and feature parity with up to date CPython. But… can’t everyone refocus the efforts and just move to pypy to add all the missing bits and then just continue with pypy as the “official python”? Are there any serious…

> pypy which is already much faster It isn't.

I think for pure python performance it is significantly faster at least on all the benchmarks I have seen. That said a lot of what people actually do in python calls into libraries that are written in C++ or C, which I believe has a similar performance (when it works) on pypy.
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