Python and the need for speed

[William Ray Wing]

> On Apr 10, 2017, at 8:25 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10 April 2017 at 02:21, Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>> 
>> ....
>> 
>> My take on the idea of making Python less dynamic in order
>> to improve speed is that you'll end up with a language that,
>> while it may superficially resemble Python, doesn't
>> really feel like Python.
>> 
>> Boo is an example of that. It has a Python-like syntax, but
>> to get any speed advantage you need to add static type
>> delarations, and then it feels more like programming in
>> C# than Python. At that point, you wonder whether you might
>> just be better off writing your program in C# to begin with.
>> 
>> That's not to say this kind of approach isn't worth pursuing,
>> but like the JIT attempts mentioned in the article, it has
>> also been tried before, with varying levels of success.
> 
> Agree. python is python and I suppose that performance issues
> has much to do with types and OOP.
> When I first started with python I thought - no, it is not possible
> without types, if I'll write something more complicated than
> hello world, it will all break at some point.
> But hell, this works and works good.
> 
> Still I miss some old school features in Python, e.g. "goto" statement would
> be very useful in some cases. I know it is considered bad style
> to use goto, but in some cases it is just most natural thing to use.
> 
> What I am (and probably many people) missing is a good tool for
> performance middle- and low-level applications.
> For me it would be a coding tool, sort of minimalist IDE, with simple
> readable syntax which generates compilable C code.
> And it would not be necessarily python-like syntax,
> but I tend to agree that for today python's syntax is
> most readable.

Have you considered Swift, now that it is open source?

Bill

> 
> The problem that many are overlooking still is that the
> possibilities for syntaxes are very limited in pure text-mode
> presentation.
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