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G. Barany:
"Python Interpreter Performance Deconstructed";
Talk: Dyla '14: 8th Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications, Edinburgh, UK; 2014-06-12; in: "Dyla '14: 8th Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications", (2014).

The Python programming language is known for performing
poorly on many tasks. While to some extent this is to be
expected from a dynamic language, it is not clear how much
each dynamic feature contributes to the costs of interpreting
Python. In this study we attempt to quantify the costs of
language features such as dynamic typing, reference count-
ing for memory management, boxing of numbers, and late
binding of function calls.
We use an experimental compilation framework for Python
that can make use of type annotations provided by the user
to specialize the program as well as elide unnecessary refer-
ence counting operations and function lookups. The com-
piled programs run within the Python interpreter and use
its internal API to implement language semantics. By sepa-
rately enabling and disabling compiler optimizations, we can
thus measure how much each language feature contributes
to total execution time in the interpreter.
We find that a boxed representation of numbers as heap
objects is the single most costly language feature on numeric
codes, accounting for up to 43 % of total execution time
in our benchmark set. On symbolic object-oriented code,
late binding of function and method calls costs up to 30 %.
Redundant reference counting, dynamic type checks, and
Python´s elaborate function calling convention have com-
paratively smaller costs.

interpreters, dynamic programming languages, unboxing, reference counting, Python

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2617548.2617552

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_233742.pdf