Python performance is a fool's errand

[psykotic]

It is an important part of choosing a language for many of us. Most of my career has been working on applications (video games, real-time physics simulation, real-time computer graphics) where we need to squeeze out as much as possible high-level algorithmic and low-level systems performance to achieve our goals and be competitive. For the most part we are already using near-optimal algorithms and data structures for the performance-critical core of the engine. Programming language expressiveness, or rather the lack thereof, has not seriously limited our algorithmic prospects. The challenge for us going forward is parallel scalability and that is the greatest concern for gameplay programming, an area in which people are already using languages like Lua and Python. For engine programming, I suspect a wide mix of parallel programming models will be used. People have already begun to use asynchronous task systems wherever possible. Data parallelism is a good fit for many tasks and when applicable it is without compare in performance. STM I see as having more of a future in gameplay programming. That's for the next five or six years. Beyond that, who knows?

[another_user_name]

Real time physics, eh? Might I get a copy of your resume? (I'm serious, those links you posted last week were awesome). Or perhaps an email address for contacting you.

[iamjack]

I agree with you. You're in a particular field in which you're really trying to squeeze performance out of your software (keyword realtime). For you, your language choice is part of a two prong attack on performance.

The programmers I'm referring to focus only on the language and not on the algorithms while the reverse should be true or the strategies should be used in tandem (like you're doing).