[GRLUG] python app speed

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Thu, 2009-07-16 at 21:44 -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Ben DeMott<ben.demott at gmail.com> wrote:
> > PHP's Weakness is ZEND - 2.0 fixed a lot of problems, but there have been
> > large amounts of talk about completely separating from the Zend Engine
> > altogether and using the same interpreter that PERL Uses as the foundation -
> > which I am in favor of - and I will help with if the decision is made.
> You're talking about the Parrot engine, right?  I wouldn't mind that,
> but for the love of Von Neuman and all that is sane, stay away from
> the Perl 5 parser!

I have a simpler solution! Don't use PHP anymore.  At work we are stuck
with it due to a *HUGE* code bases, but I'd certainly never start
anything in PHP again.  Even our full-time PHP developer now looks down
his nose at PHP.

One our best latest one is we executed a query via PDO using bound
parameters and get 70 records in the result.  Use the old 'string
builder' method to construct the query literally with the same values...
and get 72 results.   I've simply lost count of the number of bugs and
performance issues we've found in PDO.


> > Its open source, why not contribute and help the PHP community fix the
> > issue!! :)
> I filed a bug with the Debian folks when I first discovered it. I'm
> currently on the dev team for GeSHi and do the back-end stuff and
> community management for Rosetta Code.  

Ditto,  I'm hacking on other Open Source stuff. 

And there are simply things not to like about PHP anyway.  Not the least
of which is their flip-flopping and just inconsistent behavior
concerning pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value which has created
innumerable backward compatibility issues.  And there was the time they
changed the object type system's case sensitivity.  Arg.

For rapid-prototyping sloppy-typed languages I just feel that Python is
a much better choice all around.