Could Python supplant Java?

[brueckd at tbye.com]

On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Bo M. Maryniuck wrote:

> On Wednesday 21 August 2002 21:28, James J. Besemer wrote:
> > with one 150K LOC VC++ project I worked on I could change a few modules and
> > rebuild in just a few seconds.  In contrast, I just generated a fairly
> > trivial 150K Python program and it took almost 3 minutes compile (on a
> > machine 4X faster than I used for that C++ project).  
> 
> What you mean by "compile"? Python is an interpterer as Java or Perl...

I believe he meant that it took 3 minutes to generate all the .pyc files. 
This is misleading though because in Python you almost never need 'rebuild 
all' functionality (exceptions include generating .pyc's for 
distribution/packaging or generating .pyc's because you're installing 
Python as root and others won't have write access to those directories).

In a statically typed language the change to source code in one file can
trigger the recompile of many other files (e.g. change a header file), so
the time recquired to compile and link can be significant. In a
dynamically typed language like Python, however, only the files that you
actually change need to be recompiled.

-Dave