On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:57:46 -0800, Patrick Mullen wrote: > 2) In my experience, major version changes tend to be slower than > before. When a lot of things change, especially if very low-level > things change, as happened in python 3.0, the new code has not yet went > through many years of revision and optimization that the old code has.
I was around for the change from Python 1.5 -> 2.x. By memory, I skipped a couple of versions... I think I didn't make the move until Python 2.2 or 2.3 was released. Python 2.0 was significantly slower than 1.5 in a number of critical areas, but not for long. Actually, it's quite possible that Python 1.5 is still faster than Python 2.x in some areas -- but of course it misses a lot of features, and at the end of the day, the difference between your script completing in 0.03 seconds or in 0.06 seconds is meaningless. > In my opinion, python 3 was rushed out the door a bit. It could have > done with a few more months of optimization and polishing. However, on > the other hand, it is going to take so long for python infrastructure to > convert to python 3, that an earlier release makes sense, even if it > hasn't been excessively polished. The biggest reason for the speed > change is the rewritten stdio and unicode-everything. Hopefully this > stuff can be improved in future updates. I don't think anyone WANTS > cpython to be slower. I understand that the 3.0.1 release due out around Christmas will have some major speed-ups in stdio. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
