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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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...

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.

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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