sturlamolden: > On a recent benchmark Java 6 -server beats C compiled by GCC 4.2.3 And > most of that magic comes from an implementation of a dynamically typed > language (Smalltalk). [...] > http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=all〈=all
That is indeed a nice result, JavaVM has come a long way from the first one used for applets. That result comes mostly from the fact that this is a test on a 4-core CPU, that is less easy to manage from C. You can see that in the single 64-bit core tests: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all And take a look at the memory used too, up to 34 times higher for the JVM on the 4-core CPU. In the next years people that use low-level languages like C may need to invent a new language fitter for multi-core CPUs, able to be used on GPUs too (see the OpenCL), less error-prone than C, able to use the CPU vector instructions efficiently. (The D language is probably unfit for this purpose, because even if it's meant to be a system language, I don't think it can be used much to replace C everywhere it's used now.) A C+ maybe? :-) I agree that CPython may quite enjoy having something built-in like Psyco, but it's a lot of work for an open source project. Probably with 1/3 or 1/2 of the work poured on PyPy you may create that improvement for CPython. Maybe PyPy will someday produce some fruit, but I think they have used the wrong strategy: instead of trying to create something very new that someday will work, it's often better to try to improve something that today everybody uses, AND try to be useful from almost the very beginning. Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list