Comment by alayne

8 years ago

The linked post is about Python startup being a problem with thousands of invocations. Is Python startup really a problem for the niches you mention, or is it a problem in some extreme edge cases? I would argue this is the latter and perhaps signals that an architecture change for the build or tests would be best.

I have been using Python for small scripts for 20+ years and haven't had this issue. The JVM on the other hand was historically slow to start.

2 comments

alayne

PeterisP 8 years ago

If you need to run thousands of scripts, do you need to (re-)start Python for each script? IMHO what needs to be done for this problem is not faster startup, but a way to avoid startup by implementing a feature where you can keep a single Python "machine" in memory that can make a "soft reset" to execute a fresh script.

pas 8 years ago

Yep. Even PHP solved this :)
That said PHP startup (parsing, because there's no on disk bytecode cache like .pyc - though there's an in-memory one [OPcache], as somewhat expected from a server thingie) was always quite fast, and it got a bit faster in php7: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/abstract_syntax_tree#impact_on_perf...