Is Python slower than Java and how to optimize its performance?

Great question by Sonam:

"Is Python slower than Java , and how to optimize its performance?"

Python vs Java — which language is faster and how can you speed up your Python code?

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[GoldPhoenix]

1.) It's also worth mentioning Boost.Python. This is a C++ library that allows you to take C/C++ code that you or someone else wrote, include some IDL code that tells the C++ compiler what to give a Python interface, and compile that into a dynamic library. Then imp, importlib, or "ctypes.cdll.LoadLibrary()" can be applied on the Python side to import this dynamic library, and you can run C++ code (e.g. convert between C++ and Python primitives, use functions, use classes, etc). Apparently it's better in certain instances than Cython, because it converts C++ classes into literal Python classes, whereas apparently Cython puts a wrapper around the C++ class before feeding it into a Python class. This option may be better for those who learned C++ first before moving to Python, but honestly a lot of Python people are learning C++ to use Cython, anyway, so this probably is an under-utilized tool.


3.) Learning about the rough O-notation of the Python containers (list, tuple, dict, set, and their standard lib variations) for their look up, insertion, del, and other operations.

Particularly (2) and (3) for Python programmers, I feel like we all really need to internalize these facts. I have definitely not fully done this yet, but I am getting closer to remembering roughly which collections to use in which instances.

[renegadevi]

One thing to mention is what you are optimizing, just because the code runs faster doesn't mean it actually will do a real-world difference.

Back in the pre-2010 when I still wrote Java, Swing was the library to use (now I think it's evolved into JavaFX/SwingFX?), and even tho the Java code ran a lot faster then my Python+Qt code, for the end-users Python felt a lot faster because the time it took Qt to draw it on screen was a lot quicker so it felt more responsive. And the same thing is true is with these web-ui frameworks regards to performance and Javascript's "native web-applications" where e.g you have users that complain something is slow, even if you gained 40% more performance on the back-end, it doesn't mean the users will notice due to what's used on the front-end such as template-engine/javascript and all that stuff.

[TadasTalaikis]

BTW, Golang, which runs almost as fast as C, has package called grumpy which transcompiles Python 2.7 code. Not tried it yet how it's useful.

[theshermantanker]

It's not even close, even pypy can't keep up with Java's HotSpot in terms of raw speed

[jasonking]

Python is interpreted, Its about 100 times slower than Java...