[math4] pure python may be a bad idea

[Wade Brainerd]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Christian Horne
<blendmaster1024 at gmail.com>wrote:

> ... and why?
> because python is relatively slow.
> i'm not saying that python in general is bad, but everything that can be
> coded as a C/C++ PYModule probably should be, as python is noticably
> slower.


Hey Christian,

If you think about what the Python code is actually doing, this isn't really
true.   We're not crunching numbers or doing heavy 3D transformation or
image processing.

In Sugar activities, Python code executes effectively instantly.  All the
hard work happens inside Cairo, Pygame, the X driver, Numeric, etc. which
are already all written in C.

Take it from me, two of my Sugar activities (Colors! and Bounce) rely on C
extension modules.  In both cases, I stayed in Python as long as I could
before moving anything to C.  With tools like SWIG available, it's an easy
transition to make if you found find you need to.

i can say this for sure, not just because of all the places you hear that
> interpreted is slower (and i'm not saying they're wrong) but because
> XFCE runs at least 2x faster on my XO than sugar does.


Sugar's performance has a lot more to do with what its Python code is doing
than the fact that it's running Python.  Not enough attention has been paid
to optimizing it.

Best,
Wade
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