I've been hearing promises about "better than C" performance from Python for over 25 years. I remember them on comp.lang.python, back on that Usenet thing most people reading this have only heard about.
At this point, you just shouldn't be making that promise. Decent chance that promise is already older than you are. Just let the performance be what it is, and if you need better performance today, be aware that there are a wide variety of languages of all shapes and sizes standing by to give you ~25-50x better single threaded performance and even more on multi-core performance today if you need it. If you need it, waiting for Python to provide it is not a sensible bet.
I maintain a program written in Python that is faster than the program written in C that it replaces. The C version can do a lot more operations, but it amounts to enumerating 2^N alternatives when you could enumerate N alternatives instead.
Certainly my version would be even faster if I implemented it in C, but the gains of going from exponential to linear completely dominate the language difference.
So you're saying two different programs implementing two different algorithms perform differently and that lets you draw a conclusion about how the underlying language/compliers/interpreters behave?
I must have been unclear. C is faster. The Python program would be faster if I reimplemented it in C. However, Python makes it so much easier to transform the problem into a linear form that it’s a bigger win to use Python than to continue maintaining the C version.
And that’s my point: raw execution speed is only helpful when you’re executing the right thing. Don’t discount how much easier it can be to implement the right thing in Python.
I am a bit older than Python :). I imagine creator of clang and LLVM has fairly good grasp on making things performant. Think of Mojo as Rust with better ergonomics and more advanced compiler that you can mix and match with regular python.
At this point, you just shouldn't be making that promise. Decent chance that promise is already older than you are. Just let the performance be what it is, and if you need better performance today, be aware that there are a wide variety of languages of all shapes and sizes standing by to give you ~25-50x better single threaded performance and even more on multi-core performance today if you need it. If you need it, waiting for Python to provide it is not a sensible bet.