Myths and fairy tales around Python performance
Saturday, May 25
09:00 - 10:00
Python is slow: why? Can we make it faster?
Over the years, various answers to these questions have been given, and in my opinion, many of those are partial, imperfect, or just plainly wrong.
The truth is that there is no simple answer. We will examine some of the most common ones, and explain why they aren’t totally accurate. While doing so, we will examine the current status of some of the techniques currently adopted such as static typing, JIT, and AOT compilation, and explain why those alone are not enough.
Finally, we will go deeper and try to understand what are the fundamental issues to overcome, and what could be possible ways of moving forward.
Antonio Cuni
Dr. Antonio Cuni is a Principal Software Engineer at Anaconda. He is the author of SPy, a core developer of PyScript and PyPy, and one of the founders of the HPy project, which aims to design a better and more modern C API for Python. He loves to write tools from developers for developers, such as Pdb++, fancycompleter and vmprof and he is creator/maintainer/contributor of numerous other open source projects. He have also been very active in the Python community for years, giving talks at various conferences such as EuroPython, EuroSciPy, PyCon Italia, and many others. He regularly writes on the PyPy blog and on the HPy blog. His main areas of interest are compilers, language implementation, TDD and performance.