← Back to context

Comment by andrewstuart

3 years ago

I’ve been aware of it for a long time.

I don’t use it.

Why would I use it, what’s the compelling benefit?

Errm, nothing too serious. It's way faster for CPU bound code, and allows micro-threads.

This two weird tricks tend to create wonders, tho.

From the project's homepage:

> A fast, compliant alternative implementation of Python

Performance without compromising too much on compatibility seems to be the main benefit. There is a talk on the YouTube channel «Pycon Sweden» from 5 years ago where the host showed some impressive speed gains for his workload (parsing black box dumps from planes).

It's a python runtime that contains a JIT, as a result it can be phenomenally faster. Like with any JITted runtime, it depends a bit on what your code is doing, and how long you're running it for as there is a little (but honestly very little) bit of up front overhead.