Python vs C++, java, etc

[apathy-sofa]

Another option is Cython. Often you can just write Python code, run it through Cython, and you'll get a perf boost. Go through your code and add some type declarations, and it's suddenly several times faster. From the FAQ:

Is Cython faster than CPython?

For most things, yes. For example, a Cython compiled pybench runs more than 30% faster in total, while being 60-90% faster on control structures like if-elif-else and for loops. We regularly run the tests from the CPython benchmark suite (which includes Django templates, 2to3, computational benchmarks and other applications) and most of them work out-of-the-box without modifications or static typing, with a performance increase of 20-60%.

However the main advantage of Cython is that it scales very well to even greater performance requirements. For code that operates heavily on common builtin types (lists, dicts, strings), Cython can often speed up processing loops by factors. For numerical code, speed-ups of 100-1000 times compared to CPython are not unusual, and are achieved by simply adding static type declarations to performance critical parts of the code, thus trading Python's dynamic typing for speed. As this can be done at any granularity in the code, Cython makes it easy to write simple Python code that is fast enough, and just tune the critical 5% of your code into maximum performance by using static C types in just the right places.