On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 6:27 AM, Chris Moller <mol...@mollerware.com> wrote: > On 03/05/14 13:52, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >> Is there a reason you're trying to write high-level code in C? > > > Habit, mostly. I've been coding in C since the early 80s and I can do it in > my sleep. Python's okay, but I tend to think of it more as a scripting > language rather than something I want to write a 50k-line application in. > (Actually, the app I'm writing now uses Python as it's scripting > language...) I'd never heard of Pike but, looking it up, the "interpreted" > bit makes me wonder about performance.
You're writing a GUI program, which normally means it'll be waiting for the user most of the time. There's a lot you can do without even nudging a CPU monitor. Interpreted languages were fairly slow a few decades ago, but these days, the difference isn't that great - and computers are so much faster, anyway. It's usually a good tradeoff to save development time by spending a smidge more on an interactive action. I mean, let's just suppose that C code is a hundred times faster than Python (which it usually isn't, but "let's pretend", as Alice said). In most cases, that'll mean Python will take 10ms and C would take 0.1ms to respond to a user action - that is to say, the difference between "immeasurably fast" and "immeasurably fast". And in reality, the difference isn't nearly that great; if it's even ten to one for anything other than heavy numerical computation, I'd be amazed. And Pike's faster than Python overall, reducing the difference further. Happy to talk to you on- or off- list about Pike or Python. They're both excellent languages. >> PS. Has anyone else noticed that this thread is more than half by >> people named Chris? > > > Years ago, I worked in a lab where about a third of the people were named > Ron. Confusion reigned... Heh, it's weird how that goes. I have a brother named Michael who's a rail enthusiast, and one time he was car-pooling his way to some rail event or something, and all four occupants of the car had the same name. One was Mike, one was Mick, I can't remember who the other was, and my brother goes by Michael, so it wasn't confusing, but it was amusing. I find that people named Chris are often geeks. We can have long sub-threads on python-list between Chrises, and every list I join seems to have at least a couple more. Rather neat, actually. ChrisA _______________________________________________ gtk-app-devel-list mailing list gtk-app-devel-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-app-devel-list
