How robust is Python ?

[Moshe Zadka]

On Fri, 05 Jan 2001, rturpin at my-deja.com wrote:

> Unfortunately, cron is not cross-platform. We'll have
> some sort of mechanism to do this. The problem is not
> just the language and operating system, but everything
> that can kill a process. Still .. you want such mechanism
> as backup, not as a solution to regular crashes.

Of course. None of this is meant to imply Python crashes regularily.
In fact, I can't think off-hand of a language less likely to suffer
crashes, given that you take a few exception-catching precautions
in the main loop (have a catch-all except: which re-execs the process).
Perl will probably have so many "it might be undefined here" problems
that I certainly wouldn't trust it, Java's implementations are usually
buggy and C/C++ core dump at the drop of a pointer. Maybe Tcl can
be an alternative as far as reliability is concerned -- though I think
data-structures in Tcl are more prone to memory leakages then Python,
based on some experience (2-3 months writing Tcl extensions proffessionally).
Quite possibly, good Scheme implementations (say, scheme48) can outdo
Python here. Maybe good Common Lisp (cmucl, or the commercial ones) can
do better too. But I think a Python + auto-restart will be good enough
for anything short of a life-support system, and the pragmatics of Python
win big here.

-- 
Moshe Zadka <sig at zadka.site.co.il>
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