Question

I have a simple script written in both Python and Haskell. It reads a file with 1,000,000 newline separated integers, parses that file into a list of integers, quick sorts it and then writes it to a different file sorted. This file has the same format as the unsorted one. Simple.

Here is Haskell:

quicksort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
quicksort []     = []
quicksort (p:xs) = (quicksort lesser) ++ [p] ++ (quicksort greater)
    where
        lesser  = filter (< p) xs
        greater = filter (>= p) xs

main = do
    file <- readFile "data"
    let un = lines file
    let f = map (\x -> read x::Int ) un
    let done = quicksort f
    writeFile "sorted" (unlines (map show done))

And here is Python:

def qs(ar):
    if len(ar) == 0:
        return ar

    p = ar[0]
    return qs([i for i in ar if i < p]) + [p] + qs([i for i in ar if i > p])


def read_file(fn):
    f = open(fn)
    data = f.read()
    f.close()
    return data

def write_file(fn, data):
    f = open('sorted', 'w')
    f.write(data)
    f.close()


def main():
    data = read_file('data')

    lines = data.split('\n')
    lines = [int(l) for l in lines]

    done = qs(lines)
    done = [str(l) for l in done]

    write_file('sorted', "\n".join(done))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Very simple. Now I compile the Haskell code with

$ ghc -O2 --make quick.hs

And I time those two with:

$ time ./quick
$ time python qs.py

Results:

Haskell:

real    0m10.820s
user    0m10.656s
sys 0m0.154s

Python:

real    0m9.888s
user    0m9.669s
sys 0m0.203s

How can Python possibly be faster than native code Haskell?

Thanks

EDIT:

• Python version: 2.7.1
• GHC version: 7.0.4
• Mac OSX, 10.7.3
• 2.4GHz Intel Core i5

List generated by

from random import shuffle
a = [str(a) for a in xrange(0, 1000*1000)]
shuffle(a)
s = "\n".join(a)
f = open('data', 'w')
f.write(s)
f.close()

So all numbers are unique.

Answer 1

In short, don’t use read. Replace read with a function like this:

import Numeric

fastRead :: String -> Int
fastRead s = case readDec s of [(n, "")] -> n

I get a pretty fair speedup:

~/programming% time ./test.slow
./test.slow  9.82s user 0.06s system 99% cpu 9.901 total
~/programming% time ./test.fast
./test.fast  6.99s user 0.05s system 99% cpu 7.064 total
~/programming% time ./test.bytestring
./test.bytestring  4.94s user 0.06s system 99% cpu 5.026 total

Just for fun, the above results include a version that uses ByteString (and hence fails the “ready for the 21st century” test by totally ignoring the problem of file encodings) for ULTIMATE BARE-METAL SPEED. It also has a few other differences; for example, it ships out to the standard library’s sort function. The full code is below.

import qualified Data.ByteString as BS
import Data.Attoparsec.ByteString.Char8
import Control.Applicative
import Data.List

parser = many (decimal <* char '\n')

reallyParse p bs = case parse p bs of
    Partial f -> f BS.empty
    v -> v

main = do
    numbers <- BS.readFile "data"
    case reallyParse parser numbers of
        Done t r | BS.null t -> writeFile "sorted" . unlines . map show . sort $ r