A Python IDE idea - looking for input

Gerhard Häring gh_pythonlist at gmx.de
Thu Jan 3 22:25:29 EST 2002


Le 04/01/02 à 02:52, {-- Rot13 - Hateme écrivit:
> "Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in
> news:615Z7.66809$a56.41934 at atlpnn01.usenetserver.com: 
> 
> > 
> >> The language I would think of using for such a project would be c++
> >> with wxWindows.
> >>
> > Erm, wouldn't Python be a faster alternative? Once the initial
> > implementation was complete you could optimise the really slow bits
> > (if there were any) in C or C++.
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

> > 
> 
> I really hate this step. Why cannot python be faster?
> I choose python because it is easier to program with.
> Now if I want to write a good program, I have
> to use 2 languages which is not easier anymore.
> 
> Interpreter can be made to run fast. Why python cannot? 
> Asking people to optimize with C is just an lame excuse. 
> 
> Of couse, python is free (as beer and freedem), so 
> it is natural there are no people want to work on
> a faster python at this moment. Still the C excuse sucks.

Yup. But note the "if there were any". I've never needed to optimize
Python code myself, except for interfacing OS stuff or for interfacing
existing C libraries.

I've also quickly looked at some alternatives like OCaml, which do offer
an interactive interpreter *and* and a very good native code compiler
which is equal to C compilers performance-wise, but the library support
was by far worse than Python's. Also the language Ocaml itself doesn't
offer many advantages for everyday programming IMHO. Harcore FP'lers
will disagree, of course.

<OT rant>
If you want to be disillusioned about the performance increasements of
native code, just look at what compiled Java offers nowadays. If you're
lucky, it's even faster that Hotspot in JDK 1.4, with the only
difference that you paid 1000s of $ ;-)

Then, introduce some introspection (makes Java dynamic, like Python is
by default) and watch the performance of the so-called native code go
down.

I once created a primitive benchmark myself and was *really* impressed
by the Oracle Java runtime, it was almost as good as the code created by
Visual C++ and on par with gcc for my primitive sieve-of-Erathostenes
benchmark.
</OT rant>

Gerhard
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