TwirrimPython: The Optimization Ladder
>The usual suspects are the GIL, interpretation, and dynamic typing. All three matter, but none of them is the real story. The real story is that Python is designed to be maximally dynamic -- you can monkey-patch methods at runtime, replace builtins, change a class's inheritance chain while instances exist -- and that design makes it fundamentally hard to optimize.
ok I guess the harder question is. Why isn't python as fast as javascript?
> ok I guess the harder question is. Why isn't python as fast as javascript?
Actually there is a pretty easy answer: worldwide, the amount of javascript being evaluated every day is many orders of magnitude higher than the amount of python. The amount of money available for optimizing it has thus been many orders of magnitude higher as well.
I don’t think the answer is that easy. Python is typically run on the server and JavaScript is client-side, which means that the incentives are aligned to optimize Python rather than JavaScript. I think investment in each follows and the difference is more that JavaScript runs in an isolated environment with a more flexible runtime.
Nah although his answer wasn’t exactly what I’m looking for he’s not wrong. Python is not optimized because on the backend you just switch to another language that’s faster. That’s the economically optimized thing to do. Can’t do that on the frontend.