In a previous blog entry, I did some extremely informal benchmarking with Lush, OCaml, Python and C. I’ve now added two new Python tests: one with Psyco, a JIT-like solution that takes almost no effort to add to existing code, and one with Pyrex, where one can code extension modules in a language that looks just like Python but has types. These modules are then translated to C and compiled into Python usable extension libaries.
With Psyco, one only has to add the lines “import psyco; psyco.full()” to one’s Python code. The performance gains can be huge, but in general are quite modest. It takes far less effort than Pyrex though.
The updated benchmarks table is shown below:
| Language | Time (seconds) |
|---|---|
| Octave 2.1.57 | 7.894 |
| Python 2.3.4 | 0.459 |
| OCaml 3.08 interpreted | 0.229 |
| Python 2.3.5 with Psyco | 0.148 |
| Python 2.3.5 with Pyrex | 0.064 |
| OCaml 3.08 compiled | 0.021 |
| gcc 3.3.4 | 0.017 |
The new implementations are available at the usual place.