Article of interest: Python pros/cons for the enterprise

[Paul Rubin]

John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> writes:
>     This has nothing to do with language efficiency or whether the
> language is interpreted.  Of the languages listed with both hiding
> and safety, Ada and Modula 3 are always compiled to hard machine code,
> and Java can be.  (GCC offers that option.)

But Java still takes a big performance hit because of method-call
overhead, unless the compiler does whole-program optimization, if I
understand it right.  This is required in order to make sure that
private instance variables are really private against access from
malicious objects running in the same JVM.  That really does seem to
me to be a weird and expensive requirement to put into a general
purpose language.