Home Original page

Python in game development?

Kragen Sitaker kragen at dnaco.net
Tue Aug 29 20:29:35 EDT 2000 
In article <39781665.24F4C5B8 at prescod.net>,
Paul Prescod  <paul at prescod.net> wrote:
>I think by now Martijn wishes he had spoken more clearly. Python is only
>slow compared to assembly language and C. It is quite reasonable in
>performance compared to other scripting languages!!!

On 2000-04-22, I did a microbenchmark consisting of the stupid way to
compute Fibonacci numbers; the Python version was as follows:

#!/usr/bin/python
def recfib(n):
        if n <= 2:
                return 1
        else:
                return recfib(n-1) + recfib(n-2)

print recfib(33)

Here were my results, updated by more data from the next few days:

 These are the 'user' times from bash's 'time' command on my K6-2/450
 running Linux 2.2.14 with, presumably, glibc 2.1.
  . . . 
 So here's the original table, with bad entries removed and new entries
 extrapolated on the basis of minimal evidence:

    C compiled with gcc 2.95.2: 0m0.230s (see note 2)
         GForth 0.4.9-19990617: 0m2.360s
            pfe (FORTH) 0.9.14: 0m2.390s
                    pforth V21: 0m5.340s
          RScheme v0.7.3.1-b39: 0m8.110s
                       Lua 3.2: 0m9.280s
 GhostScript (PostScript) 5.10: 0m9.530s
              scm (Scheme) 5d2: 0m9.880s
          guile (Scheme) 1.3.4: 0m30.950s
          Python 1.5 (I think): 0m31.280s
                 Perl 5.005_03: 0m44.850s
                       gprolog: 47s (extrapolated)
            Klassaized Tcl 8.2: 1m11.621s
                          hugs: 2m12s (extrapolated)
                 pdksh v5.2.14: 7m32s (extrapolated)
                bash 2.03.0(1): 36m08s (extrapolated)

"Klassaized" means that my Tcl code was originally a factor of six
worse, and John Klassa showed me why and how to fix it.

Note 2 is:
 (2) To be strictly apples-to-apples, we should include the compile time,
 too: 0m0.150s.

The interesting thing about this is that Lua, whose capabilities are
fairly similar to Python's, comes out ahead of all but the most
sophisticated Scheme implementations and FORTH.

On someone else's machine, Squeak Smalltalk came out in the same league
as FORTH; I didn't have a good comparison factor and so I wasn't able
to really extrapolate to my machine very well.

Of course, the usual disclaimers are in order: language performance is
not scalar, and this test heavily stresses function-call speed,
conditional branch speed, and small-integer arithmetic speed, at the
cost of ignoring essentially everything else in the language.

Still, it is clear that a number of scripting languages are
considerably faster than Python for some tasks: FORTH, Smalltalk, Lua,
and Scheme all come out at least three times faster, and are all
scripting languages by some definition.  Some interpreted FORTH
implementations are ten times faster.
-- 
<kragen at pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]
More information about the Python-list mailing list