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Dropbox Announces Their Own Open-Source Python

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  • #21
    Originally posted by brk0_0 View Post
    Take a look at MIT's Julia Language. I know Python and Matlab are the current kings on this land, but Julia is very promissing and VERY fast.
    I know about Julia, but whether it will ever replace Python is still an open question. It has a core set of very dedicated developers, but its community is very, very far from Python's at this point. That may change, but there is no guarantee it will change, especially if python gets a unified JIT system.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by litfan View Post
      Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day it'll be true.
      Not everything revolves around the web you know. Python is actually used in Scientific Computing quite extensively
      and it's gaining momentum in this area. Python in it's own is not quite as useful as
      what you can easily do with Python/Cython/C++/C/Fortran etc (see e.g. xdress for how easy it can be to interface C++).
      The use cycle is usually: 1. Prototype in Python 2. Profile to identify hot-spots. 3. Move those parts (usually <5% of codebase) to ${FAVOURITE_COMPILED_LANGUAGE}.

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      • #23
        Once again, a team picks up a fancy and trendy language without giving consideration to performance, only to realize later that they need C++ kind of performance. But guess what, a better compiler won't be much helpful if your code is highly dependent on dynamic objects and garbage accumulation (collection as many prefer to call it).

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        • #24
          Originally posted by sarmad View Post
          Once again, a team picks up a fancy and trendy language without giving consideration to performance, only to realize later that they need C++ kind of performance. But guess what, a better compiler won't be much helpful if your code is highly dependent on dynamic objects and garbage accumulation (collection as many prefer to call it).
          Once again, a team picks up a language that allows them to deliver quickly and well, and being able to do so they outperform their competition and establish them as the market leader, to the point they actually can dedicate time and money to contribute back to the language community with a new interpreter... I think this story is pretty similar to that of that other little site you may have come across time to time... what was called? Ah, yes.... Facebook!

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          • #25
            Originally posted by litfan View Post
            Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day it'll be true.
            Have you ever used Python/Django and Node.JS?
            I have. What I chooses Django for I would never ever even think about Node for
            and the same is true in reverse.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by [wrd] View Post
              An intern at google tried that and it's called unladen swallow [1].

              it seems alot more promising to look into the openjdk world. Some people are working on truffle a specializing ast implementation.
              There is an experimental branch that implements this for python3 ([2]).

              Actually LLVM is a pretty bad JIT. Some people tried to make an OpenJDK backend that uses LLVM to make a plattform independent JIT called Shark. It was very slow ([3]).


              [1]: https://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/
              [2]: https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy
              [3]: http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ZeroSharkFaq
              They've also tried to use LLVM for a JavaScript JIT and it was pretty bad.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by Qaz` View Post
                I use python for a lot of small tools and batch scripts at work. We are a c++ shop, but use python for "scripty things" and build/content management. Neither go or js are hardly alternatives there. Not that I do any heavy lifting in python, but it is excellent in orchestrating the tools that do. Python is king at string management and "batteries included".

                There is software development being done outside of the web.
                Indeed... at my day job we developed a cross-platform native GUI for our main product in Python (which was originally written in C++/MFC for Windows only). We also use Python for lots of other things such as our build system (using SConstruct and our own custom code to interact with CVS and Samba), generating C++ code (with Cog), parsing and converting HDL (hardware description language) code to various different file formats, and more.
                Last edited by shaurz; 04 April 2014, 09:41 PM.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by quasipedia View Post
                  To be honest, the OP to me seemed more genuinely clueless about what he was talking about, than trolling. But yeah... I was surprised too by the amount of replies he got!

                  Let me try too: C is dead, C is dead!!! Whoever uses C nowadays is stupid, PHP is sooooo much better!!!
                  I may have missed some "<sarcasm>" tag somewhere, but the huge amount of actively maintained C code seems to suggest other wise.

                  ... and good luck writing high performance user/kernel code in PHP...

                  - Gilboa
                  oVirt-HV1: Intel S2600C0, 2xE5-2658V2, 128GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX1080 (to-VM), Dell U3219Q, U2415, U2412M.
                  oVirt-HV2: Intel S2400GP2, 2xE5-2448L, 120GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX730 (to-VM).
                  oVirt-HV3: Gigabyte B85M-HD3, E3-1245V3, 32GB, 4x1TB, 2x480GB SSD, GTX980 (to-VM).
                  Devel-2: Asus H110M-K, i5-6500, 16GB, 3x1TB + 128GB-SSD, F33.

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                  • #29
                    Originally posted by quasipedia View Post
                    Once again, a team picks up a language that allows them to deliver quickly and well, and being able to do so they outperform their competition and establish them as the market leader, to the point they actually can dedicate time and money to contribute back to the language community with a new interpreter... I think this story is pretty similar to that of that other little site you may have come across time to time... what was called? Ah, yes.... Facebook!
                    Those are the successful examples, what about the other hundreds of projects that never got the financial success needed to write a new compiler? What about the other example where the company got more successful than Facebook and have their own language and compiler team already and still couldn't improve the situation because it has gone beyond fixable (Microsoft)? But hey, let's pick a language that trades performance for quick delivery and leave it up to the users to replace their machines for faster machines.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by sarmad View Post
                      Those are the successful examples, what about the other hundreds of projects that never got the financial success needed to write a new compiler? What about the other example where the company got more successful than Facebook and have their own language and compiler team already and still couldn't improve the situation because it has gone beyond fixable (Microsoft)? But hey, let's pick a language that trades performance for quick delivery and leave it up to the users to replace their machines for faster machines.
                      First, machine cost = low. Human cost = high. If a company did not achieve financial success through a language that shifted costs towards the machine end of the spectrum, they would only have failed more rapidly if they picked a highly efficient, error-prone, difficult to debug language. There's a reason why organisations like Google, Gnome or Mozilla all developed new languages (Go, Vala, Rust respectively) for moving costs onto machines.

                      Second. To the best of my knowledge none of Dropbox clients is in Python (they are compiled binaries, not PYC files, at least on my machine), so your remark on requiring users to upgrade their machines is just irrelevant.

                      Third. I hate Microsoft, yet... what's wrong with their .NET platform? What are you referring to with "beyond fixable"? If it weren't for the proprietary licences, I would swap C# for PHP any day...

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