Comparative evaluation of performance-boosting tools for Python

Abstract

The Python programming language has a number of advantages, such as simple and clear syntax, concise and readable code, and open source implementation with a lot of extensions available, that makes it a great tool for teaching programming to students. Unfortunately, Python, as a very high level interpreted programming language, is relatively slow, which becomes a nuisance when executing computationally intensive programs. There is, however, a number of tools aimed at speeding-up execution of programs written in Python, such as Just-in-Time compilers and automatic translators to statically compiled programming languages. In this paper a comparative evaluation of such tools is done with a focus on the attained performance boost.