On Mon, 05 Sep 2005 21:43:07 +0100, Michael Sparks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steve Jorgensen wrote: ... >> I don't get that. Python was never designed to be a high performance >> language, so why add complexity to its implementation by giving it >> high-performance capabilities like SMP? > > It depends on personal perspective. If in a few years time we all have > machines with multiple cores (eg the CELL with effective 9 CPUs on a chip, > albeit 8 more specialised ones), would you prefer that your code *could* > utilise your hardware sensibly rather than not. > > Or put another way - would you prefer to write your code mainly in a > language like python, or mainly in a language like C or Java? If python, > it's worth worrying about!
Mainly in Python, of course. But it still feels like a pretty perverted idea to fill a SMP system with something as inefficient as interpreting Python code! (By the way, I don't understand why a computer should run one program at a time all the time. Take a time-sharing system where lots of people are logged in and do their work. Add a CPU there and you'll have an immediate performance gain, even if noone is running programs that are optimized for it!) I feel the recent SMP hype (in general, and in Python) is a red herring. Why do I need that extra performance? What application would use it? Am I prepared to pay the price (in bugs, lack of features, money, etc) for someone to implement this? There's already a lot of performance lost in bloatware people use everyday; why are we not paying the much lower price for having that fixed with traditional code optimization? I am sure some applications that ordinary people use could benefit from SMP (like image processing). But most tasks don't, and most of those that do can be handled on the process level. For example, if I'm compiling a big C project, I can say 'make -j3' and get three concurrent compilations. The Unix shell pipeline is another example. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <jgrahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ algonet.se> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list