On 10/18/06, Bob Ippolito <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Once everything is in place you first replace code that's slow with better algorithms. If you still need better performance, then you try other means. It usually is fast enough at this point, and you're done. In many cases you can beat (naive) C or C++ in speed simply because it's more natural to write good algorithms and use appropriate data structures in Python.
Bob has it exactly right here - the algorithm and approach for what you are doing is usually much more significant than the speed of the language or operations (an excellent thing to be aware of when optimizing in any language). It is true that python is much much slower than compiled languages to the tune of 20 to 1 or so for a lot of things (stuff like flattening bezier curves, drawing gradients pixel by pixel, or updating thousands of tiny particles, inner loop stuff), but I find it's so easy to put together cleaner, more readable and more intelligent code with python that I spend much less time needing to optimize than I do with C++ game development. Sure C++ executes faster, but people will write much dumber and more wasteful code in it in my experience. I'm suprised how many times I find people having written code that ends up drawing everything twice, or reloading assets unnecessarily, or doing very naive brute force solutions etc. on top of a well tested c++ engine.
