Because many programmers I respect are fond of Python, I’m forcing myself to learn it (again). On my previous attempts, I ran into some annoyances and dropped it. This time, I’m trying to solve some Facebook puzzles by gluing together existing libraries. I tried the Peak Traffic puzzle, which is to enumerate the maximal cliques in a directed graph. Some searching led me to an excellent library for graph problems called NetworkX. Some tinkering with the library hit the first problem: on very large complete graphs, I kept blowing the stack. That’s because v0.99 uses (perfectly normal) recursion to solve the problem but hits a stack limit in Python. In v1.0, the devs were forced to implement their own stack to get around this annoying limit. The second issue is that this is a branch & bound optimization problem, which can easily make use of many cores. Instead, the program maxes out at 50% cpu. This would have been trivial to parallelize in .NET 4.0 or Fortress with parallel blocks.
So I thought maybe Jython might solve both problems. Unfortunately, Jython (v2.5) is 4X slower than CPython running the exact same script on a very large input file. Next, Jython also sets the recursion limit to 1000 stack frames, so I ran into the same issue. I know I can raise it manually, but that doesn’t help when I write a program and don’t know how far I’m going to recurse. Why set an arbitrary limit? Just throw the same runtime exception when the platform runs out of space like every other language on the planet. Finally, I imported jsr166, an excellent threadpool library for Java. But on a simple fibonacci test, the performance was so much slower than the equivalent Java program that it simply wasn’t worth considering. It did, however, make use of more threads, though it rarely went over 80%. Maybe there’s a lock somewhere that’s slowing things down. In summary, Jython sucks and CPython is acceptable.
