How fast is Python?

I think Keyle's answer (among others) brings home a basic point: a huge amount depends on how you do things. That link gave two answers for C++, but I have a hard time believing that anybody would normally write C++ that's much like either one. My first attempt would look something like this:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>
#include <time.h>

class person { 
    int count_;
    static int current_;
public:
    person() : count_(++current_) {}
    int count() { return count_; }
};
int person::current_ = 0;
typedef std::vector<person> plist;
class chain {
    plist people_;
    void check_wrap(std::vector<person>::iterator &p) {
        if (p==people_.end())
            p = people_.begin();
    }
    void advance(std::vector<person>::iterator &p, int places) {
        for (int i=0; i<places; i++)
            check_wrap(++p);
    }
public:
    chain(int length) : people_(length) {}
    person *kill(int n) { 
        plist::iterator current = people_.begin();
        while (people_.size()>1) {
            advance(current, n);
            current = people_.erase(current);
            check_wrap(current);
        }
        return &(*current);
    }
};
int main() {
    const int ITER = 1000000;  
    clock_t start = clock();
    for(int i = 0 ; i <ITER; i++) {
        chain c(40);
        c.kill(3);  
    }
    clock_t end = clock();
    std::cout << "Time per iterator: " << (((end - start) /(double)CLOCKS_PER_SEC/ITER)*1000000 << " microseconds.\n";
    return 0;
}

(For portability I've used clock() instead of gettimeofday, but anybody who wants can easily change that back).

There are a couple of points about this that strike me as interesting. First, the code has gotten a lot shorter -- in fact, competitive as the shortest code shown. Second, the code has gotten quite a bit faster -- probably faster than anything but the specially optimiz

For the Python, velocity depends also for the interpreter implementations... I saw that pypy is generally faster than cpython.