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Its more deep grained that "the VM is slow" The default python interpreter is really quite fast, but biggest performance problem with python is that everything is an object.

Don't believe me? look here: https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2014/05/09/why-python-is-slow...

perl is not much older, but in a majority of tasks its faster than python, even c-API python. (it even threads!)

Yes it could be engineered around, I assume thats what pypy is doing (although STM is is going to limit performance in a threaded environment)

Javascript was designed to be an embedded language, so it was had to be quick to initialize, and have a simple object model.

Python was designed to be an easy object oriented language.



That's not why Python is slow. That's why Python is harder to optimize.

Being harder to optimize is not being slow. This is an important distinction. If you want to know what that means and the real reason why Python is slow, go read this instead: https://speakerdeck.com/alex/why-python-ruby-and-javascript-...


Aren't things that are harder to optimize generally slower for precisely that reason?




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