Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/07/07/15:05:12
On Tue, 2015-07-07 at 13:42 -0400, Dave McGuire (mcguire AT neurotica DOT com)
[via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:
> Of course Python fell into
> that category ~20 years ago, and it has gained massive popularity
> (though I'll never understand why!)...realistically, that's a success
> story that very few programming languages will emulate.
Yes -- Pythons popularity is a bit strange indeed. My feeling was, that
8 years ago Ruby's and Python's popularity was similar, and I
concentrated on Ruby, because for me it was more elegant (and is still).
But now Python is more popular. Some companies decided for it, people
followed. And I admit some stuff like NumPy, mathplotlib is not
available for Ruby.
>
> And further (and I apologize if it sounds like I'm picking on you
> here), rabid proponents of dozens of "pet" programming languages have
> claimed them to be "as fast as C!!" for decades. I didn't believe it
> then, and I don't believe it now.
>
> -Dave
The new languages are fast! Very fast! I have seen many benchmarks,
micro and real life. D, Rust, Nim are very close to C generally. There
may be a few exceptions, but generally that can be fixed with minimal
rewriting of the code. And Crystal and Julia are really fast although.
Go is generally a bit slower. Even Java is very very fast today, but is
limited by the startup time for the VM of course. Developers have done
really fine work, so speed is a point which we can simple ignore today.
Bare metal and kernel development is a more important point. Nim and
Rust supports that well. Rust of course has the "advantage" that it does
not force usage of Garbage Collector, some people are fearing that, i.e.
for delay in games. But Nims GC is really fine. Parallel processing,
concurrency, threading is an very important point in these days -- I
have still to learn much about this. I do not know which languages does
this best -- but all are open source, so they can learn from each
other.
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