A story about Python... sort of

[Roy Smith]

Dave Brueck  <dave at pythonapocrypha.com> wrote:
> True, although rather than let the frame rate continue up the game designers 
> will simply add more polygons, more actors, more textures, greater viewable 
> distance, etc. so they won't ever reach the "fast enough" point either. 

On the other hand, much of that low-level rendering stuff is done in
hardware (and more and more every day).  The application running on
the main CPU is less and less of a factor.  To a certain extent, the
question is not Python vs. C++, but ATI vs. Nvidia, and how well the
app takes advantage of the underlying hardware.

The same is true in a lot of domains.  Modern network switches
implement all of the critical-path logic in hardware, and (for the
most part) all the software does is provide a management/configuration
interface.  It's not unusual for a switch to be running at or near
capacity, and the CPU usage to be 10% or less.  In a situation like
that, it just doesn't matter how fast the software is.  Time to market
and robustness are much more important.