wordcount

There is a similar great project here [1] with the Hungarian Wikipedia corpus. Great workout for non English and maybe non-ascii operations. The performance of Java there is super impressive. It should port relatively quickly to this file too... [1] https://github.com/juditacs/wordcount

As long as you use the python procedures that are written in C you will not really get much by using pypy. Try it yourself, write some IO and string heavy code and compare. [1] But as you say: for numeric computations python is slow as molasses. [1] or just look at something like https://github.com/juditacs/wordcount/blob/master/README.md . The simple py2 version is 2.5 times slower than a java version someone spent a lot of time writing, and less than 2 times slower than a reasonably straightforward C program.

Python is actually pretty fast for some things. The string and I/O operations are all written in decently fast C, so some types of problems are actually a good fit for python, speed wise. It won't beat a well written java programming, but you can come a long way with very little code. Pointless things like this comes to mind: https://github.com/juditacs/wordcount/blob/master/README.md Two persons in the #guile irc channel tried hard to make a guile version run faster than the python3 version, and after a long time got it on par with it, and guile2.2 is usually about 3-5x faster than python in my completely unscientific benchmarks.