SBCL is fast. People seem to lump together dynamically typed languages, but the reality is that python and ruby forgot all the things learned during the 80s and early 90s.
My experience is that small programs like this are usually at least an order of magnitude faster in SBCL compared to python. At least if the python code spends some time in actual python instead of offloading to C.
Things like proper static modules so that you know what is being called so you can elide lookups at call-time. That is a pretty big omission, TBH.
For a long time (still?) python had a horribly inefficient value representation in memory. Now, integer tagging is probably no fun to add as an afterthought, but it shouldn't have been an afterthought.
Exception handling is sloooow. And iterators use exceptions to signal that younhave exhausted the collection. Because iterating over a complete collection is exceptional.
I understand the need to keep cpython simple, but some of these things ARE simple and have been well understood since a decade before python 1.0.
On the contrary. Static modules would mean static classes with no possibility of changing a class. That would be another pretty nice optimization you could do, making class lookups a lot faster. I am not alone in thinking this would be a good idea. The Instagram folks wrote about it, iirc.
That rationale for using an exception is only valid because CPython procedure calls are expensive. A proper optimizing compiler will have a hard time rewriting that implicit try/catch into a goto.
I think Dart nailed iterators in this regard: no special values, and a protocol that is transparent to the compiler, which has the benefit of requiring no special cases at all. In the current state of cpython, of course, that falls into the "2 expensive procedure calls that can't be inlined because everything can be mutated at any time" type of a problem.
>Static modules would mean static classes with no possibility of changing a class. That would be another pretty nice optimization you could do, making class lookups a lot faster.
I think the whole point of python is to make everything dynamic. It seems like this trade-off is voluntary, i.e. it is a feature, not a bug.
My experience is that small programs like this are usually at least an order of magnitude faster in SBCL compared to python. At least if the python code spends some time in actual python instead of offloading to C.