Python Performance vs. C++ in a Complex System

[Hannah Schroeter]

Hello!

In article <mailman.987965259.10112.python-list at python.org>,
Gabriel Ambuehl  <gabriel_ambuehl at buz.ch> wrote:
>[...]

>That's what I thought. As long as you aren't a good programmer able to
>play with poll()/select() while a sleep, the whole network
>programming, if it comes down to speed, is horrible to do.

Dunno. For me, programming always new select() based main loops wasn't
*too* difficult. However, after factoring out some common code in a C++
basis, writing reactive network servers got even easier, still without
the overheads of pthreads. Of course, it's even neater to do that
with a thread abstraction with a lightweight implementation, such as
stackless python is supposed to be (or Erlang, or SML/NJ's CML implementation,
or ...).

>[...]

>Threading in either C or C++ is a major PITA. Since the compiler
>doesn't take complete care of the memory management, you can do
>serious fuck ups with threads (and as we all know, buffer overflows
>are common even in normal apps).

That, and also, at least I like a message based threading model
much more, however, I ran into major deadlocks when trying to
do that in C/pthreads once, and rewrote it to do shared accesses
on the data structures, protected by locks. Probably I've done
too much Erlang lately *g*

>[...]

Kind regards,

Hannah.