That stat about Python being slower than Java finally made me switch

I was all in on Python for like 2 years. Made a few small tools and a web scraper. Then I read this post on Stack Overflow from a guy who benchmarked a sorting algorithm. Python took 12 seconds for something Java did in 0.8 seconds. I couldn't believe the gap was that huge. Found the exact numbers on some blog called "The Computer Language Benchmarks Game" site. So I spent last weekend learning basic Java with a free course on YouTube. Now I'm rebuilding my scraper and it's already 6 times faster at parsing files. Has anyone else hit that wall where a language just can't keep up with your project size?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahm396d ago

Friend of mine had the exact same wake up call. He built a whole data processing pipeline in Python for his thesis project and it took like 45 minutes to run on a good day. He switched to Go over a weekend and got it down to 4 minutes. He was literally mad at himself for not doing it sooner. Python's fine for small scripts but once you scale up it really shows its limits.

benclark6d ago

Did you ever end up trying Go yourself after hearing that? That speed difference is wild, I'd be kicking myself too if I spent that long waiting on Python.

david5623d ago

Man I had a buddy who did almost the same thing with batch image processing. He spent weeks optimizing his Python code and then one night just rewrote it in Rust on a whim and got a 20x speedup. Did you ever switch your own workflow over to something faster?