Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but using numpy is not really Python anymore - at that point you'd be comparing to C, not Python. Anyway I think the benchmark is underwhelming for a different reason - Python is extremely slow so beating it surely isn't that Impressive? I guess on the other hand... one guy has made a faster language than one made by an entire army of Python developers.
Eh, but Python isn't designed to be fast. In fact, you might say Python is designed to be slow (it's not, but that's a fun way to look at it) because it does so much . If you don't want to have the kind of runtime flexibility that Python has, then arguably you should have better performance to show for it - Python is planning on finding ~40% speed ups in the coming year. That said, I don't know what the goals of this…
Since the most popular scripting language is Lua, I can name three big disadvantages of Lua that Umka is trying to fix:
- Verbose and unfamiliar syntax
- Type error detection at run time instead of compile time (a direct consequence of dynamic typing)
- Data structures not compatible with C (which is particularly odd, as Lua is specifically designed to interact with C)
So yes, Umka's main goals are not related to performance.