this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Programming
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Putting it mildly! Threading bugs are probably the worst class of bugs to debug
Definitely debatable if this is worth the risk of impossible bugs. Python is very slow, and multi threading isn't going to change that. 4x extremely slow is still extremely slow. If you care remotely about performance you need to use a different language anyway.
Python can be extremely slow, it doesn't have to be. I recently re-wrote a stats program at work and got a ~500x speedup over the original python and a 10x speed up over the c++ rewrite of that. If you know how python works and avoid the performance foot-guns like nested loops you can often (though not always) get good performance.
Unless the C++ code was doing something wrong there's literally no way you can write pure Python that's 10x faster than it. Something else is going on there. Maybe the c++ code was accidentally O(N^2) or something.
In general Python will be 10-200 times slower than C++. 50x slower is typical.
You're thinking of CPython. PyPy can routinely compete with C and C++, particularly in allocation-heavy or pointer-heavy scenarios.
I am indeed thinking of CPython because a) approximately nobody uses PyPy, and b) this article is about CPython!!
In any case, PyPy is only about 4x faster than CPython on average (according to their own benchmarks) so it's only going to be able to compete with C++ in random specifics circumstances, not in general.
And PyPy still has a GIL! Come on dude, think!