Can Go really be that much faster than Python?

Question

I think I may have implemented this incorrectly because the results do not make sense. I have a Go program that counts to 1000000000:

package main

import (
             


        

Answer 1

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.