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Specifically, an interpreter without JIT. I'd reckon that LuaJIT or Javascript could come much closer to C.



For me, running their sample script using the PyPy JIT resulted in a 12x speedup compared to cpython.

Though that still wasn't as fast as gcc on my system (core i5 3.4ghz; using 1e8 rounds):

* cpython 2.7.4 - 1.131s

* pypy 2.6.0 - 0.090s

* gcc w/ "-O2" - 0.050s


Right, those are usually called JIT compilers, not interpreters.


The distinction is not all that useful, and is blurred nowadays. You could say that CPython compiles code to bytecode, but the bytecode is then interpreted; however, none of that matters, because it's doing very little optimization and that means it's slow. Javascript is typically also not compiled ahead-of-time to native code, but it can still be very fast because of JIT; at the same time it's still very much a dynamic language which makes it share features with interpreted languages.

I'd say JIT is neither about compilation nor interpretation, but about optimization.




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