GNU/Linux vs. Windows as Python platform

[Alex Martelli]

"Terry Reedy" <reedy37 at home.com> wrote in message
news:97WM6.478$uk2.228879 at news1.rdc2.pa.home.com...
> Has anyone (reading this) had experience with running Python under both
> Windows and Linux/Unix on the same machine (or equivalent machines)?  If
> so, have you noticed any advantages either way?  (Other than the issue of
> prebuilt versus compile-your-own binaries.)

I mostly use Windows these days, but my brand-new machine will
be Linux again (at long last!) so I did some tests.  Huge advantage
on Windows: thanks to COM (and win32all &c), Python is already
integrated with *everything* you can possibly think of.  E.g: no
doubt there _are_ office-packages, 3D CAD/PDM applications, and
so on, that you can fully automate with Python on Linux... but you'll
have to search a lot, maybe write some C, etc.

On Windows, it's exactly as it should be: no commercial app today
can fail to expose a reasonably complete COM object model, so you
CAN drive it from Python.  No ifs, no buts.

The huge number of available ActiveX controls (both free and
commercial) similarly means your only problem regarding getting
functionality 'x' from Python, for ANY 'x', is choosing among dozens
of offerings (at least all available in COM/ActiveX).

In just about everything else, I think Linux is superior.  I've done
very partial tests with one app that is key for me (a double dummy
bridge-play engine which I drive from Python for my research, which
is commercially sold for both Windows and Linux), but the speed
for such a purely-computational app seems about 20% better on
Linux vs Win98 (better memory mgmt, I suspect -- better filesystem
may count for a little, but, it IS mostly computation).  That ain't hay
(I might get a part of that 20% with NT, I guess, but it doesn't seem
to run on my home box -- some missing drivers -- so it would have
to be Win2K, and that one takes more RAM, disk, etc, than my old
box has free:-).  Configuring a new machine shows that, for what
you save in terms of cost of OS and development tools (VStudio)
by going with Linux rather than Win2K you can about double the
amount of disk, double the amount of RAM, and get a CPU that is
about 30% faster -- at least, with the modest budget I intend to
devote to my new home box:-).  Once more, that ain't hay...

...but I sure WILL miss COM...!


Alex