dead simple programs are equally fast to write in any language
If you look at their code, it's just some statically allocated multidimensional arrays, some simple nested loops (corresponding to array dimensions), and a small amount of arithmetic and occasional if statement.
The C code doesn't give you the safety net of array bound checking, and the for loop syntax is annoying to the uninitiated, but there's really not a lot of difficulty in using C or C++ in this way. Certainly the development time difference between it and Python would be absolutely minimal.
Interesting that their test Mac is a 2.3 GHz quad core i7 (model unspecified), while the Windows machine is a quad core i7-3770 at 3.4 GHz, and yet the execution times are pretty much identical or even faster.
The conclusion from that is the Mac is a laptop with massive SpeedStep taking it up to to around 3.3 or even 3.5 GHz (current 15" Retina MBP).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
