Can Go really be that much faster than Python?

pypy actually does an impressive job of speeding up this loop

def main():
    x = 0
    while x < 1000000000:
        x+=1

if __name__ == "__main__":
    s=time.time()
    main()
    print time.time() - s

---

$ python count.py 
44.221405983
$ pypy count.py 
1.03511095047

~97% speedup!

Clarification for 3 people who didn't "get it". The Python language itself isn't slow. The CPython implementation is a relatively straight forward way of running the code. Pypy is another implementation of the language that does many tricky (especiallt the JIT) things that can make enormous differences. Directly answering the question in the title - Go isn't "that much" faster than Python, Go is that much faster than CPython.

Having said that, the code samples aren't really doing the same thing. Python needs to instantiate 1000000000 of its int objects. Go is just incrementing one memory location.

One billion is not a very big number. Any reasonably modern machine should be able to do this in a few seconds at most, if it's able to do the work with native types. I verified this by writing an equivalent C program, reading the assembly to make sure that it actually was doing addition, and timing it (it completes in about 1.8 seconds on my machine).

Python, however, doesn't have a concept of natively typed variables (or meaningful type annotations at all), so it has to do hundreds of times as much work in this case. In short, the answer to your headline question is "yes". Go really can be that much faster than Python, even without any kind of compiler trickery like optimizing away a side-effect-free loop.

This scenario will highly favor decent natively-compiled statically-typed languages. Natively compiled statically-typed languages are capable of emitting a very trivial loop of say, 4-6 CPU opcodes that utilizes simple check-condition for termination. This loop has effectively zero branch prediction misses and can be effectively thought of as performing an increment every CPU cycle (this isn't entirely true, but..)

Python implementations have to do significantly more work, primarily due to the dynamic typing. Python must make several different calls (internal and external) just to add two ints together. In Python it must call __add__ (it is effectively i = i.__add__(1), but this syntax will only work in Python 3.x), which in turn has to check the type of the value passed (to make sure it is an int), then it adds the integer values (extracting them from both of the objects), and then the new integer value is wrapped up again in a new object. Finally it re-assigns the new object to the local variable. That's significantly more work than a single opcode to increment, and doesn't even address the loop itself - by comparison, the Go/native version is likely only incrementing a register by side-effect.

Java will fair much better in a trivial benchmark like this and will likely be fairly close to Go; the JIT and static-typing of the counter variable can ensure this (it uses a special integer add JVM instruction). Once again, Python has no such advantage. Now, there are some implementations like PyPy/RPython, which run a static-typing phase and should fare much better than CPython here ..

You've got two things at work here. The first of which is that Go is compiled to machine code and run directly on the CPU while Python is compiled to bytecode run against a (particularly slow) VM.

The second, and more significant, thing impacting performance is that the semantics of the two programs are actually significantly different. The Go version makes a "box" called "x" that holds a number and increments that by 1 on each pass through the program. The Python version actually has to create a new "box" (int object) on each cycle (and, eventually, has to throw them away). We can demonstrate this by modifying your programs slightly:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Printf("%d %p\n", i, &i)
    }
}

...and:

x = 0;
while x < 10:
    x += 1
    print x, id(x)

This is because Go, due to it's C roots, takes a variable name to refer to a place, where Python takes variable names to refer to things. Since an integer is considered a unique, immutable entity in python, we must constantly make new ones. Python should be slower than Go but you've picked a worst-case scenario - in the Benchmarks Game, we see go being, on average, about 25x times faster (100x in the worst case).

You've probably read that, if your Python programs are too slow, you can speed them up by moving things into C. Fortunately, in this case, somebody's already done this for you. If you rewrite your empty loop to use xrange() like so:

for x in xrange(1000000000):
    pass
print "Done."

...you'll see it run about twice as fast. If you find loop counters to actually be a major bottleneck in your program, it might be time to investigate a new way of solving the problem.