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Comment by jfe | Hacker News Reader

looks great. but i can't help but think it would save everyone a lot of time -- maybe not up-front, but in the long-run -- if we wrote these frameworks in c and just wrote language bindings for r, python, ruby, etc. why are we rebuilding good frameworks over again just because they're not written in our preferred language?

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There is a big divide between interpreted and compiled resources though.

If you have the original source in an interpreted language, it supports your ARM raspberry pi or chromebook just as well. With the C variation you need to build / package / install.

I've kinda just come to accept that code re-use cross language has never been good except with the unix pipe.

haven't linux package managers (e.g. emerge, aptitude, yum, etc.) basically solved the packaging problem?

Not really.

The problem there is updates: you'll get bugfixes, maybe even backported bugfixes, but in order to get a new version with new features you either have to deal with installing/building from a non-OS-package-manager source, or upgrade your entire OS.

Or add ppa/OBS/hosted repo that builds the latest version.

It's quite a bit of work to make sure that a project is available on all potentially relevant distros and always up-to-date, so that only works for popular projects, and even for those there are often alternative package sources to get current versions on older releases etc.

Except tons of Python code depends on C. This project depends on Pandas. Pandas has C dependency.

So to run this there's code that needs to be compiled anyway.

Good idea! What's stopping you?

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