Python & Go

[sturlamolden]

On 12 Nov, 01:53, kj <no.em... at please.post> wrote:
> I'm just learning about Google's latest: the GO (Go?) language.
> (e.g.http://golang.orgorhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s).
> There are some distinctly Pythonoid features to the syntax, such
> as "import this_or_that", the absence of parentheses at the top of
> flow control constructs, and quite a few statements without a
> trailing semicolon.  Then again, there's a lot that looks distinctly
> un-Pythonlike, such as the curly brackets all over the place.  And
> among the un-Pythonlike stuff there's a lot that looks like nothing
> else that I've ever seen...


It seems that the argument for using Go over Python is speed. They
achieve that by static typing. According to Debian benchmarks, LuaJIT
delivers the same performance as Google cleaims for Go (about 20% loss
compared to C), and that is from a completely dynamic language. (Lua
is Python's sibling.) It makes me wonder what Python would be like on
LuaJIT.

Perhaps we should make a Python frontend for the Lua VM and try? It
would be fun :-)

Anyway, the impressive performance of LuaJIT on Debian benchmarks just
tells med that static typing a la Go is not needed for fast execution
of CPU-bound code.

And looking at Go, I cannot understand why Google prefer this over
e.g. Lua.