[GRLUG] python app speed

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 09:32 -0400, john-thomas richards wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 08:44:11AM -0400, peyeps at iserv.net wrote:
> [snip]
> > What I was thinking of was a single location where you could buy an
> > application for any platform, Windows, Mac and Linux.  There are so many
> > things out there that are for only one or two platforms.
> > Even free stuff is not available for all platforms.  For example the
> > Chrome browser, though I understand there is a beta for Linux available
> > now.
> > Possibly applications built on top of Python might be good candidates for
> > the "Universal App Store", because Python is available for all three
> > platforms.  There might be a speed issue with python though.  I don't know
> > because I've not done anything with it myself.
> I'm an alpha tester for an opensource python app (lyric projection;
> http://openlp.org) and I can say that speed---at least with this
> app---is not an issue.  It may be my machine (doubtful) or it may be
> good coding (dunno; not a developer) or it may be a simple application
> (projecting lyrics/text with two monitors or monitor/projector) or it
> may really be that python speed isn't a concern.  All this to say that
> in my very limited experience, the question of speed with python isn't
> even on my radar.

Python is measurably slower than C/Java/.NET, but not terribly so.  For
a long-lived Python app I'd be more concerned about the effectiveness of
GC than of raw speed;  but I haven't personally seen anything to
indicate there is a real problem with GC.  That is just a gut feeling I
have after dealing with many generations of various 'script' and
sloppy-typed languages.