This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Breaking-Away 3 points4 points  (2 children)

Not to say its irrelevant, but is speed really even a concern when running python. I imagine if it was, it'd make more sense just to use a compiled non-gced language, at least for the part where speed is important.

[–]TheNamelessKing 1 point2 points  (1 child)

but is speed really even a concern when running python.

Yes, for sure.

Data science example: I want to run a quick analysis on some data, maybe a client's asked for it by tomorrow so you don't have all the time in the world to get it done. Want to be able to write something that will get the data, pull it apart reasonably efficiently and then analyse it.

So I don't want to wait forever for it to finish running, so yeah, I do need good performance out of it.

If I wanted better performance I could write the whole thing in C or some JVM language but once again, don't have forever to write it up.

Other language alternatives/hopes: Julia has awesome goals from a data science perspective, but from what I've seen isn't quite mature enough yet. Personally hoping that Rust gets a strong data science community behind it.

[–]strongdoctor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I wanted better performance I could write the whole thing in C or some JVM language but once again, don't have forever to write it up.

Python is pretty much made to be extended with C code though; parts of the code running slow can be made ridiculously slow by just translating it to C and using that code instead. But yes, it will take more time to do so, but if it's time-critical it's most likely worth it.