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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

Go, C/C++, but in the ideal world- Python (they would have to very seriously tweak the interpreter)- imagine how easy app creation would have become with Python? They would have a huge advantage over iOS by lowering the entry thresholds for developers.

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Python is neither fast enough or robust enough to use as the foundation for an OS. You need static typing and strong tooling both for performance and for correctness. Those that disagree with this need only point me to a successful counter-example.

LuaJIT is a performance counterexample for dynamic typing, being around the same as Java.

LuaJIT may make the performance of Lua better or even just acceptable in some cases, but it does nothing to help ensure correctness. Correctness is almost always more important than performance. It most cases it is useless to do something quickly, but to also be doing it incorrectly.

I was responding to the OP who said static typing was necessary for performance, by providing a counterexample.

And "better or just acceptable" is rather dismissive of the facts.

Strongtalk is another example that can be given of dynamic performance.

Google has modified Java for Android. They could have instead modified Python. There have been academic papers that have shown that Python can be made to be statically typed (ignoring one or two keywords, like eval).

Assuming that Google had done these, there should be no reason that Python would not be fast or robust enough.

Yeah Guido was basically asked this at a PyCon in the past. He was working for Google and at some point he probably had brought up the question. Someone in the audience asked about it and his comment was that it was "political". In other words technically possible but powers that be decided against it for other reasons. It is also important how he said it, he was very calm before and after, but when answering that question he was visibly upset. You could tell it was a sore topic for him that made him pretty angry.

"They would have a huge advantage over iOS by lowering the entry thresholds for developers."

Low entry thresholds for developers is nothing but poison for a platform.

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