Python faster than C++? How does this happen?

Question

I'm using Windows7 using CPython for python3.22 and MinGW's g++.exe for C++ (which means I use the libstdc++ as the runtime library). I wrote two simple programs to compare their speed.

Python:

x=0
while x!=1000000:
    x+=1
    print(x)

C++:

#include <iostream>
int main()
{
    int x = 0;
    while ( x != 1000000 )
    {
        x++;
        std::cout << x << std::endl;
    }
    return 0;
}

Both not optimized.

I ran c++ first, then i ran python through the interactive command line, which is much slower than directly starting a .py file.

However, python outran c++ and turned out to be more than twice as fast. Python took 53 seconds, c++ took 1 minute and 54 seconds.

Is it because python has some special optimization done to the interpreter or is it because C++ has to refer to and std which slows it down and makes it take up ram?
Or is it some other reason?

Edit: I tried again, with \n instead of std::endl, and compiling with the -O3 flag, this time it took 1 min to reach 500,000.

Answer 1

One of my colleague at work told me that Python code is faster than C++ code and then showed this topic as an example to prove his point. It is now obvious from other answers that what is wrong with the C++ code posted in the question. I still would like to summarize my benchmarks which I did in order to show him how fast a good C++ code can be!

There are two problems with the original C++ code:

• It uses std::endl to print a newline in each iteration. That is a very bad idea because std::endl does more stuff than simply printing a newline — it also forces the stream to flush the buffer accumulated so far; flushing is an expensive operation as it has to deal with hardware – the output device. So the first fix is this: if you want to print a newline, just use '\n'.

• The second problem is less obvious as it is not seen in the code. It is in the design of C++ streams. By default, C++ streams are synchronized to the C streams after each input and output operation so that your application could mix std::cout and std::printf, and std::cin and std::scanf without any problem. This feature (yes, it is a feature) is not needed in this case so we can disable this, as it has a little runtime overhead (that is not a problem; it doesn't make C++ bad; it is simply a price for the feature). So the second fix is this: std::cout::sync_with_stdio(false);

And here is the final optimized code:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::ios_base::sync_with_stdio(false); 

    int x = 0;
    while ( x != 1000000 )
    {
         ++x;
         std::cout << x << '\n';
    }
}

And compile this with -O3 flags and run (and measure) as:

$ g++ benchmark.cpp -O3    #compilation
$ time ./a.out             #run

//..

real   0m32.175s
user   0m0.088s
sys    0m0.396s

And run and measure python code (posted in the question):

$ time ./benchmark.py

//...

real  0m35.714s
user  0m3.048s
sys   0m4.456s

The user and sys time tell us which one is fast, and by what order.

Hope that helps you to remove your doubts. :-)

Answer 2

There isn't anything obvious here. Since Python's written in C, it must use something like printf to implement print. C++ I/O Streams, like cout, are usually implemented in a way that's much slower than printf. If you want to put C++ on a better footing, you can try changing to:

#include <cstdio>
int main()
{
    int x=0;
    while(x!=1000000)
    {
        ++x;
        std::printf("%d\n", x);
    }
    return 0;
}

I did change to using ++x instead of x++. Years ago people thought that this was a worthwhile "optimization." I will have a heart attack if that change makes any difference in your program's performance (OTOH, I am positive that using std::printf will make a huge difference in runtime performance). Instead, I made the change simply because you aren't paying attention to what the value of x was before you incremented it, so I think it's useful to say that in code.

Answer 3

I think we need more information, but I would expect you're building an un-optimized build of C++. Try building it with the -O3 flag. (someone who knows GCC better will have more and better recommendations). However, here's some timings from a completely untrustworthy source: http://ideone.com. I ran each 5 times to get some measure of variance on the timing, but only the origonal C++ varied, and not much at that.

Python: http://ideone.com/WBWB9 time: 0.07-0.07s
Your C++: http://ideone.com/tzwQJ time: 0.05-0.06s
Modified C++: http://ideone.com/pXJo3 time: 0.00s-0.00s

As for why my C++ was faster than yours, std::endl forces C++ to flush the buffer immediately. '\n' does the newline without the forced buffer flush, which is much much much faster.

(note: I only ran to 12773, since ideone.com kills processes after they display a certain amount of output, that was the most the server would give me)

Answer 4

std::endl lags (it does more than just write a newline).

Using '\n' directly will make your C++ code run faster.

Answer 5

Same problem as posed in Why is reading lines from stdin much slower in C++ than Python? but in the opposite direction.

add

std::cout.sync_with_stdio(false);

to the top of the program