Is there something wrong with this python code, why does it run so slow compared to ruby?

Question

I was interested in comparing ruby speed vs python so I took the simplest recursive calculation, namely print the fibonacci sequance.

This is the python code

Answer 1

The recursion efficiency of python is the cause of this overhead. See this article for much more detail. The above solutions that solve this iteratively are better for python since they do not incur the function call overhead recursion does. My assumption about ruby would be that it is clearly optimizing the code while python is not. Again, that article goes into a lot detail about this using a nearly identical fib function.