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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?

#61

Post by tredre3 »

kstrauser wrote: post #50
npalli wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, python is plenty fast if you make sure it calls C or Rust behind the scenes. Typical of 'professional' python people. Something too slow? just drop into C. It surely sounds weird to everyone who complains about Python being slow and the response is on these lines.

But that’s the whole point of it. You have the option to get that speed when it really matters, but can use the easier dynamic features for the very, very many use cases where that’s appropriate. This is an eternal conversation. Years ago, it was assembler programmers laughing at inefficient C code, and C programmers replying that sometimes they don’t need that level of speed and control.

You are correct. However it took about only about 10 years for C compilers to beat hand assembly (for the average programmer), thus proving the naysayers wrong.

Meanwhile Python is just as slow today as it was 30 years ago (on the same machine).

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

#62

Post by kstrauser »

svara wrote: post #45
bowsamic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not use a faster language in the first place? Well for the obvious reason that there isn't really anything like a Jupyter notebook for C. I can interactively manipulate and display huge datasets in Python, and without having to buy a Matlab license. That's why Python took off in this area, really

I believe I heard that argument since before jupyter became popular. Usually it was accompanied by saying that the time needed to write code is often more important than the time it takes to run, which is also often true. All that said, jupyter is probably part of python's success, although I'm not the only one who actively avoids it and views it as a bit of a code smell.

I love Jupyter! What I don’t love is people writing large projects in a workbook, then asking how to run it as-is in production so they can continue to iterate on it in that form.

It’s not impossible, but neither is it the sort of thing you want to encourage.

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

#63

Post by jerf »

moralestapia wrote: post #32

Very interesting post, thanks for putting it together. Rust is indeed quite fast, I thought NodeJS was much better tbh., although it's not bad. I'd be interested to learn what's holding it back because I've seen many implementations where V8 can get C++-like performance (I mean it's C++ after all). Perhaps there's a lot of overhead in creating/destroying temporary objects.

V8 gets C++-like performance when it is getting code that JITs very well. This is typically highly-numeric code, even sometimes tuned specifically for the JIT. This tends to cause a great deal of confusion when people see the benchmarks for that highly numeric code and then don't understand why their more conventional code doesn't get those speeds. It's because those speeds only apply to code you're probably not writing.

If you are writing that sort of code, then it does apply; the speed for that code is real. It's just that the performance is much more specific than people think it is. In general V8 tends to come in around the 10x-slower-than-C for general code, which means that in general it's a very fast scripting language, but in the landscape of programming languages as a whole that's middling single-thread performance and a generally bad multiprocessing story.

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

#65

Post by username223 »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #49
username223 wrote: post #42

tl;dr: Two orders of magnitude slower than Rust, so 2-3 orders slower than native. Python on a 2 GHz processor runs as fast as C on a 2-20 MHz processor.

*for very specific benchmarks, not "on average"

True, Python could be better or worse than two orders of magnitude slower for your particular use case, but it's 70x slower for recursion and addition that it clearly hasn't special-cased. That's good to know.

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

#66

Post by bee_rider »

npalli wrote: post #44
kstrauser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing Python professionally for a couple of decades, and there've only been 2-3 times where its performance actually mattered. When writing a Flask API, the timing usually looks like: process the request for .1ms, make a DB call for 300ms, generate a response for .1ms. Or writing some data science stuff, it might be like: load data from disk or network for 6 seconds, run Numpy on it for 3 hours, write it…

LOL, python is plenty fast if you make sure it calls C or Rust behind the scenes. Typical of 'professional' python people. Something too slow? just drop into C. It surely sounds weird to everyone who complains about Python being slow and the response is on these lines.

Even as a Fortran programmer, the majority of my flops come from BLAS, LAPACK, and those sort of libraries… putting me in the exact same boat as the Python programmers, really. The “professional” programmers in general don’t worry too much about tying their identities to language choices, I think.

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

#67

Post by Karrot_Kream »

npalli wrote: post #44
kstrauser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing Python professionally for a couple of decades, and there've only been 2-3 times where its performance actually mattered. When writing a Flask API, the timing usually looks like: process the request for .1ms, make a DB call for 300ms, generate a response for .1ms. Or writing some data science stuff, it might be like: load data from disk or network for 6 seconds, run Numpy on it for 3 hours, write it…

LOL, python is plenty fast if you make sure it calls C or Rust behind the scenes. Typical of 'professional' python people. Something too slow? just drop into C. It surely sounds weird to everyone who complains about Python being slow and the response is on these lines.

This is a very common pattern in high level languages and has been a thing ever since Perl had first come onto the scene. The whole point was that you use more ergonomic, easier to iterate languages like Perl or Python for most of your logic and you drop down into C, C++, Zig, or Rust to write the performance sensitive portions of your code.

When compiled languages became popular again in the 2010s there was a renewed effort into ergonomic compiled languages to buck this trend (Scala, Kotlin, Go, Rust, and Zig all gained their popularity in this timeframe) but there's still a lot of code written with the two language pattern.

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

#68

Post by famouswaffles »

npalli wrote: post #44
kstrauser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing Python professionally for a couple of decades, and there've only been 2-3 times where its performance actually mattered. When writing a Flask API, the timing usually looks like: process the request for .1ms, make a DB call for 300ms, generate a response for .1ms. Or writing some data science stuff, it might be like: load data from disk or network for 6 seconds, run Numpy on it for 3 hours, write it…

LOL, python is plenty fast if you make sure it calls C or Rust behind the scenes. Typical of 'professional' python people. Something too slow? just drop into C. It surely sounds weird to everyone who complains about Python being slow and the response is on these lines.

People really misconstrue the relationship between Python and C/C++ in these discussions.

Those libraries didn't spring out of thin air, nor were they ever existing.

People wanted to write and interface in python badly, that's why you have all these libraries with substantial code in another language yet research and development didn't just shift to that language.

TensorFlow is a C++ library with a python wrapping. Pytorch has supported C++ interface for some time now, yet virtually nobody actually uses tensorflow or pytorch in C++ for ML R&D.

If python was fast enough, most would be fine, probably even happy to ditch the C++ backends and have everything in python, but the reverse isn't true. The C++ interface exists, and no-one is using it. C++ is the replaceable part of this equation. Nobody would really care if Rust was used instead.

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

#70

Post by Y_Y »

nadermx wrote: post #10

Tangential, but I practically owe my life to this guy. He wrote the flask mega tutorial in what I followed religiously to launch my first website. Then right before launch, in the most critical part of my entire application; piping a fragged file in flask. He answered my stackoverflow question, I put his fix live, and the site went viral. Here's the link for posterity's sake https://stackoverflow.com/a/34391304/41802…

Cool story, but was your life really at risk in that situation?
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