[Python-Dev] Re: native code compiler? (or, OCaml vs. Python)

[Dave Brueck]

On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, [iso-8859-1] Graham Guttocks wrote:

> "Barry A. Warsaw" <barry@python.org> wrote:
> >
> > Really?  How many of these 2100+ projects (just to pick a few at
> > random <wink>) aren't serious?
>
> Serious wasn't a good choice of word, but I think you know what
> I mean.
>
> e.g, what if I wanted to write an httpd daemon that could scale as
> well as Apache (millions of hits/day)? Python would not be up to
> the task. A language like CMUCL or OCaml would be, because they offer
> a native code compiler.

Depending on your type of traffic, a server may be network bound long
before it's CPU bound, so compiling doesn't really help much.

Millions of hits per day isn't a big deal, BTW. At the company I work for
we have a Python server that easily handles 200 req/sec on sub-1GHz Intel
boxes. At constant load that's about 20 million per day. While not as fast
as Apache, it's far higher performance than we or many other sites need.

-Dave