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Comment by skizm | Hacker News Reader

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skizm·

Python a D have totally different use cases. Just because you can do something with Python doesn't mean you should.

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Tell that to all those guys writing desktop utilities in Python slow as molasses.

Every time I get some GNU/Linux GUI utility running very very slow and check the code, it is Python under the hood.

On the other hand, every time I start a program and have to wait tens and hundreds of seconds for it to finally fully load, it's invariable written in C, C++ or Java...

Now I could start bashing Java and the others, but I hope I don't need to and that you already realized that your comment is a bit unfair.

Please, it's really unfair to single out Linux GUI tools. Basic system utilities are also written in python, like yum, which masks its slowness by doing network access on each invocation and makes you think that's why it's so slow.

I singled out GUIs, because it seems to be so pervasive nowadays, as if the coders couldn't do better.

And yum has always been much slower than apt-get.

...and it it used to be far worse. In the old days it was spending most of its time parsing metadata, until the C metadata parser introduced, and later sqlite databases were added to repositories as an alternative for the XML metadata.

I even backported the C metadata parser to CentOS 3 and 4, because it was a whole different experience altogether:

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2007-May/0017...

Are you sure it's not Java you mean? Everytimg i see a slow desktop app it's Java. What python apps do you mean? Sublime Text starts and runs very fast for me, for example. No complaints here and no difference to some other light weight editor like gedit.

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