YASS (Yet Another Success Story)

[Gabriel Genellina]

En Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:58:02 -0300, k3xji <sumerc at gmail.com> escribió:

> Started a project year ago with hard goals in mind : Developing a game
> server which can handle thousands of clients simultaneously. [...]
> I don't know Python at the time and only coded few simple projects
> with it.

And you still could write the server - that's very good (and shows your  
own great skills and Python ease of use...)

> After profiling the code, it turns out most of the time is spent on
> the following:
> [...] 3) Redundant try-except's in all over place(Again our fault to make
> the system stable, we have put some debug purposed-assert like try-
> excepts in the main server flow.)

I don't think this should make a difference. Setting up a try/except block  
usually has a very small cost (if no exception is actually raised). Care  
to tell us more details?

> Just one note
> about optimizing Python code: do not optimize Python code based on
> your assumptions, just go and test if it really runs faster. I don't
> want to go to details of this hint, but believe me making Python code
> optimized may be very very tricky.

Yes, specially if you came from a statically typed language; what looks  
"innocent" may have a significant cost (e.g. resolving obj.name), and what  
looks complicated may be fairly fast (e.g. a list comprehension).

> It is then I decided to write up here this as a success story, as I am
> very newcomer to Python but come up with a nearly commercial product
> in a very short period of time and I don't think this is about my
> personal characteristics and intelligence or so:), as I am old enough
> to know/meet that there are much much more brilliant people than I am
> and they also have similar experiences with Python.

Thanks for sharing your experience!

> So, one last note: every software project goes same tasks as above
> often much much more officially and carefully, I would suggest
> managers to see that just do not listen to the ordinary brain-washes.
> Python is a great choice for easy developing, easy debugging, easy
> maintaining and most importantly very very time-friendly. Of course
> there will be tasks .n which Python is suitable, but hey, if it Python
> is in the list, take it seriously.

Nice summary!

-- 
Gabriel Genellina