Is Python faster and lighter than C

Question

I ve always thought that Python s advantages are code readibility and development speed  but time and memory usage were not as good as those of C     These stats struck me really hard   What does your experience tell you about Python vs C   time and memory usage

User · Answer

It s the same problem with managed and easy to use programming language as always - they are slow  and sometimes memory-eating    These are languages to do control rather than processing  If I would have to write application to transform images and had to use Python too all the processing could be written in C   and connected to Python via bindings while interface and process control would be definetely Python

User · Answer

All the slowest   100x  usages of Python on the shootout are scientific operations that require high GFlop s count  You should NOT use python for those anyways  The correct way to use python is to import a module that does those calculations  and then go have a relaxing afternoon with your family  That is the pythonic way

User · Answer

I think you re reading those stats incorrectly  They show that Python is up to about 400 times slower than C   and with the exception of a single case  Python is more of a memory hog  When it comes to source size though  Python wins flat out   My experiences with Python show the same definite trend that Python is on the order of between 10 and 100 times slower than C   when doing any serious number crunching   There are many reasons for this  the major ones being  a  Python is interpreted  while C   is compiled  b  Python has no primitives  everything including the builtin types  int  float  etc   are objects  c  a Python list can hold objects of different type  so each entry has to store additional data about its type  These all severely hinder both runtime and memory consumption   This is no reason to ignore Python though  A lot of software doesn t require much time or memory even with the 100 time slowness factor  Development cost is where Python wins with the simple and concise style  This improvement on development cost often outweighs the cost of additional cpu and memory resources  When it doesn t  however  then C   wins

User · Answer

I think those stats show that Python is much slower and uses more memory for those benchmarks - are you sure you re reading them the right way up   In my experience  which is mostly with writing network- and file-system-bound programs in Python  Python isn t significantly slower in any way that matters   For that kind of work  its benefits outweigh its costs

User · Answer

My experience is the same as the benchmarks   Python can be slow and uses more memory   I write much  much less code and it works the first time with much less debugging   Since it manages memory for me  I don t have to do any memory management  saving hours of chasing down core leaks   What s your question

User · Answer

Source size is not really a sensible thing to measure  For example  the following shell script   cat foobar   is much shorter than either its Python or C   equivalents

User · Answer

Also  Psyco vs  C     It s still a bad comparison  since noone would do the numbercrunchy stuff benchmarks tend to focus on in pure Python anyway  A better one would be comparing the performance of realistic applications  or C   versus NumPy  to get an idea whether your program will be noticeably slower

User · Answer

The problem here is that you have two different languages that solve two different problems    its like comparing C   with assembler   Python is for rapid application development and for when performance is a minimal concern   C   is not for rapid application development and inherits a legacy of speed from C - for low level programming

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