On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Mohan R <mohan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I still differ, People who want performance don't consider Python/Ruby. > A careful design can make scalability easier by writing it in C and do an > glue-scripting, rather than Ruby/Python. >
When we talk performance, let's talk about what exactly we mean by it. Most applications are never bottlenecked on the CPU and are most of the time waiting for I/O. In such cases, the so-called "overhead" of running a dynamic language like perl/python/ruby far outweighs the drawbacks. Writing good code in C is probably twice as hard as writing good code in perl (and probably 10x as hard as writing good code in python / ruby). By "good", I mean, maintainable, readable and modular code. That said, when it comes to shell there is one problem I've faced a lot: Since shell scripts leverage external utilities (like cat/sort/cut/etc.,) that can be realized only after a 'fork()' and since most people today prefer to run stuff on VMs, the performance of fork system call on certain VM hosts is unpredictable and bad. Sometimes it may take several seconds for a seemingly harmless process like cat to instantiate. > > I'm not an architect who can talk about scalability/performance of a big > or enterprise level application, just an amateur programmer, but in my > opinion, whatever complex the problem, a well defined split-up and > writing tools for each split can scale whatever level we want. > > Want a proof? just look at git. It doesn't suck!! because it was not > written in Python/Ruby, its a bunch of C programs which can be used as > commands in bash (as well as in any language). what you say about this? > with your so called Python/Ruby scalability? > git is a fairly limited and well defined problem area that involves mostly string manipulation. Also, its open source (and open source software quality _usually_ is better than enterprise grade software, IMHO). Consider something more complex and event driven, like your typical enterprise grade HTTP application that is under a constant pressure of meeting deadlines and people whose, shall we say, social conditioning is not necessarily wired for the most elegant solutions but instead for those that just work and those that give them recognition in their social circle (read: "career"). Cheers, -Suraj -- Career Gear - Industry Driven Talent Factory http://careergear.in/ _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
