Typing system vs. Java

Alex Martelli aleaxit at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 6 12:06:03 EDT 2001


"Christopher Barber" <cbarber at curl.com> wrote in message
news:psoitg1md4l.fsf at jekyll.curl.com...
> anamax at earthlink.net (Andy Freeman) writes:
>
> > Christopher Barber <cbarber at curl.com> wrote in message
> > > You didn't respond to my comments on potential for performance gains.
> > > Can I assume that I scored a point?  ;-)
> >
> > Only if you've already exhausted algorithm/architecture/infrastructure
> > improvements and "decrease run-time at any cost" really is the primary
> > consideration.
>
> It could be pretty expensive to move all of your code to a faster language
if
> you discover that Python is not good enough.  Sometimes you can write C
> extensions for the slow parts, but in some cases you will have to start
over.

Applications whose "performance bottleneck" is _100%_ of their code?!
Never heard of any such thing.  10% to 20% seems to be common.  What
counter-examples do you have in mind?


> Don't get me wrong, Python is a great language and is useful for many
types of
> applications, but it is ridiculous to say that there aren't a significant
> number of applications for which it does not have the required
performance.

Not by itself, surely -- but, when using Python together with lower-level
languages for that 10% to 20% of code whose speed really matters, I
can't easily think of examples.  Maybe if you have a *code-side* constraint,
e.g. in an embedded device where you must burn a small ROM device,
rather than a speed one -- but then you should look into a threaded
interpreter (Forth and the like), which tends to give you the greatest
bang-for-the-bit -- an issue which doesn't have much (or anything) to
do with the 'potential for performance gain' due to static-typing.


Alex






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