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Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
101–110 of 164 posts
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#102This seems like very low hanging fruit. How is the core loop not already hyper optimized? I'd have expected it to be hand rolled assembly for the major ISAs, with a C backup for less common ones. How much energy has been wasted worldwide because of a relatively unoptimized interpreter?
Python’s goal is never really to be fast. If that were its goal, it would’ve had a JIT long ago instead of toying with optimizing the interpreter. Guido prioritized code simplicity over speed. A lot of speed improvements including the JIT (PEP 744 – JIT Compilation) came about after he stepped down.
I doubt it would have a JIT a long time ago. Thing is, people have been making JIT compilers for Python for a long time now, but the semantics of the language itself is such that it's often hard to benefit from it because most of the time isn't in the bytecode interpreter itself, it's dispatching things. People like comparing Python to JavaScript, but Python is much more flexible - all "primitive" types are objects can be subclassed for example, and even basic machinery like attribute lookups have a bunch of customization hooks.
So the problem is basically that a simple JIT is not beneficial for Python. So you have to invest a lot of time and effort to get a few percent faster on a typical workload. Or you have to tighten up the language and/or break the C ABI, but then you break many existing popular libraries.
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Games and Proton. Apparently people that care about performance do run Windows.
None of those games, or a very small amount of them, are written in python. None of the ones that need to be performant for sure.
Games aren't written in Python as a whole, but Python is used as a scripting language. It's definitely less popular now than it used to be, mostly thanks to Lua, but it still happens.
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#104I have quetion - slightly off topic, but related. I was wandering why is pyhton interpreter so much slower than V8 javascript interpreter when both javascript and python are dynamic interpreted languages.
Python is much, much more dynamic. E.g. look at how something as basic as accessing an attribute on an object works: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/descriptor.html
Also Python has a de facto stable(ish) C ABI for extensions that is 1) heavily used by popular libraries, and 2) makes life more difficult for the JIT because the native code has all the same expressive power wrt Python objects, but JIT can't do code analysis to ensure that it doesn't use it.
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#105I don't understand this focus on micro performance details... considering that all of this is about an interpretation approach which is always going to be slow relatively speaking. The big speed up would be to JIT it all, then you dont need to care about structuring of switch loops etc
You'd be surprised at how little speedup you get from simply JIT-compiling the Python bytecode. It's so high-level that most interesting stuff happens in the layers below anyway.
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#106[dead]
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#107[dead]
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#108[dead]
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#109After years of admonition discouraging me, I’m using Python for a Windows GUI app over my usual C#/MAUI. I’m much more familiar with Python and the whole VS ecosystem is just so heavy for lightweight tasks. I started with tkinter but found it super clunky for interactions I needed heavily, like on field change, but learning QT seemed like more of a lift than I was interested in. (Maybe a skill issue on both fronts?)…
Look at pyfltk also. I haven't used the windows builds, but it's real nice on GNU/Linux.
Re: Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster
#110After years of admonition discouraging me, I’m using Python for a Windows GUI app over my usual C#/MAUI. I’m much more familiar with Python and the whole VS ecosystem is just so heavy for lightweight tasks. I started with tkinter but found it super clunky for interactions I needed heavily, like on field change, but learning QT seemed like more of a lift than I was interested in. (Maybe a skill issue on both fronts?)…
I really like the Python + Qt/pyside combination. I can whip together a rough GUI using QtCreator and then write the app logic in Python super quickly.