Re: Python in a desktop environment
I have coded some complex programs in python in the recent past. I find it very robust and also not very slow (as is depicted by the starter of this thread ) I use wxpython on the gui side and testify that it is indeed very suitable for huge gui apps. may be pyqt is good enough too and I believe so. I don't find there is any reason to go stay in a hut when you have a banglo to stay. may be c++ gives you more control on pointers etc but what if you just forgot to use that control properly? afterall we are all humans. so python is really good for speed as well as robustness if you can understand the meaning of it. and I wont want to again give the meaning of the word because some one has already done it. regards. Krishnakant. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer a écrit : On Mar 12, 9:56 am, Bruno Desthuilliers bruno. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Diez B. Roggisch a écrit : Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) Nope. Dealing with dangling references and double frees, complex copy-semantics that change only by a feeble character or via overloaded and thus hard to comprehend assignment operators are all properties of C++, Indeed and tremendously afflict robustness IMHO. robustness of programs written with this language, yes. NB : I'm afraid the smiley got lost somewhere between screen and readers, so here comes another one !-) Everyone seems to have misunderstood what I want. Possibly. I'm a Python developer, I don't give a rats ass about what people say about C#, Python, or c++, they all have their uses. My main reasoning for considering C++ as the backend is some things (reading memory for example) are much easier to do in C++ than in Python, Depends. But anyway nothing prevents you from having a few functions in a C extension for this part... and we already have a lot written in C++. The argument about robustness, has nothing to do with how nicely formatted the language is, or how great the tracebacks are, Certainly not. It has to do with readability (which helps spotting obvious bugs), simplicity (which helps understanding the whole damn thing), and automatic memory management (which really makes a difference, even for seasonned C and C++ programmers). it's strictly about how high the memory cost is and how much CPU it's going to take. This is a performance issue, not a robustness issue. Wrong qualificative !-) Python is well known for being high on memory and C++ being compiled can be a lot faster for things. Even compiled to native code, Python wouldn't probably be much faster - it's way too dynamic. Or this would require 30+ years of work (like we've seen for Lisp). If you have performance-critical parts that can't be solved by a pure-python solution or a binding to an external lib, then yes, it makes sens to recode these parts in a lower-level language. But this is not exactly a python front-end for a C++ backend, it's a python program with some C or C++ extensions. My 2 cents... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On 13 Mar, 04:33, Grant Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007-03-13, David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and we already have a lot written in C++. [...] I think you're nuts to decide that you need C++ before you've tested a Python implementation, but it's your nickle. :) I'm imagining that the luxury of throwing away a large amount of existing code just isn't an option. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED], Grant Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm a Python developer, I don't give a rats ass about what people say about C#, Python, or c++, they all have their uses. My main reasoning for considering C++ as the backend is some things (reading memory for example) are much easier to do in C++ than in Python, and we already have a lot written in C++. ^ [cut] Anyways, thanks for everyones feedback, we will most likely go with a combination of Python and C++. I think you're nuts to decide that you need C++ before you've tested a Python implementation, but it's your nickle. :) It really sounds like it's the C++ legacy that's driving Mr. Edward's decision. The rest are just arguing points. Which several people have jumped at. -- Lou Pecora (my views are my own) REMOVE THIS to email me. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On 2007-03-13, Dennis Lee Bieber [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:45:30 -, Grant Edwards [EMAIL PROTECTED] declaimed the following in comp.lang.python: IMO, robustness is also a quality of a language. In language like C and C++, it's difficult to write a program that isn't full of potential crashes and exploits: buffer overflows, broken pointers, memory leaks, etc. Python eliminates many of those sources of problems, and is therefore a more robust language. And if one doesn't like the dynamic behavior of Python, there is always a visit to comp.lang.ada Or Modula-3. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! I am KING BOMBA of at Sicily!...I will marry visi.comLUCILLE BALL next Friday! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On 2007-03-11, David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! If Robert Di Niro at assassinates Walter Slezak, visi.comwill Jodie Foster marry Bonzo?? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On 2007-03-12, Bruno Desthuilliers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) IMO, robustness is also a quality of a language. In language like C and C++, it's difficult to write a program that isn't full of potential crashes and exploits: buffer overflows, broken pointers, memory leaks, etc. Python eliminates many of those sources of problems, and is therefore a more robust language. -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Uh-oh!! I forgot at to submit to COMPULSORY visi.comURINALYSIS! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) Nope. Dealing with dangling references and double frees, complex copy-semantics that change only by a feeble character or via overloaded and thus hard to comprehend assignment operators are all properties of C++, and tremendously afflict robustness IMHO. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
Diez B. Roggisch a écrit : Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) Nope. Dealing with dangling references and double frees, complex copy-semantics that change only by a feeble character or via overloaded and thus hard to comprehend assignment operators are all properties of C++, Indeed and tremendously afflict robustness IMHO. robustness of programs written with this language, yes. NB : I'm afraid the smiley got lost somewhere between screen and readers, so here comes another one !-) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On Mar 12, 9:56 am, Bruno Desthuilliers bruno. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Diez B. Roggisch a écrit : Bruno Desthuilliers wrote: Grant Edwards a écrit : (snip) Python is _far_ more robust than C++. I wouldn't say so - robustness is a quality of a program, not of a language !-) Nope. Dealing with dangling references and double frees, complex copy-semantics that change only by a feeble character or via overloaded and thus hard to comprehend assignment operators are all properties of C++, Indeed and tremendously afflict robustness IMHO. robustness of programs written with this language, yes. NB : I'm afraid the smiley got lost somewhere between screen and readers, so here comes another one !-) Everyone seems to have misunderstood what I want. I'm a Python developer, I don't give a rats ass about what people say about C#, Python, or c++, they all have their uses. My main reasoning for considering C++ as the backend is some things (reading memory for example) are much easier to do in C++ than in Python, and we already have a lot written in C++. The argument about robustness, has nothing to do with how nicely formatted the language is, or how great the tracebacks are, it's strictly about how high the memory cost is and how much CPU it's going to take. Python is well known for being high on memory and C++ being compiled can be a lot faster for things. Anyways, thanks for everyones feedback, we will most likely go with a combination of Python and C++. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On 2007-03-13, David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Everyone seems to have misunderstood what I want. One might suspect that your request was unclear. ;) I'm a Python developer, I don't give a rats ass about what people say about C#, Python, or c++, they all have their uses. My main reasoning for considering C++ as the backend is some things (reading memory for example) are much easier to do in C++ than in Python, and we already have a lot written in C++. Reading memory is actually pretty trivial in Python. The argument about robustness, has nothing to do with how nicely formatted the language is, or how great the tracebacks are, it's strictly about how high the memory cost is and how much CPU it's going to take. No, that's not at all what robust means (at least not to anybody I know). Robust means that the program is always well-behaved. It doesn't crash. It doesn't leak memory. It isn't full of security holes. It's got nothing to do with resource usage. Python is well known for being high on memory and C++ being compiled can be a lot faster for things. True, but that's nothing to due with robustness. A fast, small program that crashes, leaks memory, and gives incorrect results is not robust. A large slow program that doesn't crash regardless of input and produces correct results is robust. Anyways, thanks for everyones feedback, we will most likely go with a combination of Python and C++. I think you're nuts to decide that you need C++ before you've tested a Python implementation, but it's your nickle. :) -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! Make me look like at LINDA RONSTADT again!! visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer schrieb: On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) Erm, and what has _robustness_ with fast less overhead to do? It's exactly the other way round, a python program is much less likely to crash that C/C++, and if so in manners that are much easier to manage and fix. I've done extensive GUI-development with PyQt, and can say that it's a very productive and powerful combination. And GUI-code usually isn't troublesome performance-wise. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) So if you want it to be robust it's a no brainer: Python and no C++ or C. I'd advise you to start off doing it in pure Python, then when you get it working see if it is fast enough, and if not profile it and find the bottlenecks. Those bits which really do need speeding up you should then rewrite using Pyrex, which won't take long at all since it is basically the same syntax. Also see whether Psyco helps. Python can be slow, but if you leverage the built in functionality correctly you'll find it isn't much slower than C/C++ for many tasks, and can even be faster than you would get from C/C++ without a spending a very long time optimising it (that's because people have already spent a very long time optimising Python's builtin functionality). Even if you do eventually find you have to rewrite parts of the code in C/C++ you should first have done what you can to optimise it in Python. Usually the best way to speed up something which is too slow is to use a different algorithm. That sort of change is comparatively easy to do in Python but an expensive programming exercise in C/C++. When you come to reimplement it then you'll be converting the already optimised code, which in many cases will be much easier than writing it in C/C++ from scratch. If you look at http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~prechelt/Biblio/jccpprtTR.pdf you'll see that, at least for that task, the relative runtimes for C/C++ and Python widely overlap. Yes, the C/C++ implementation included some very fast ones, but they also included slows ones (and only Python of all the languages tested had no unusable implementations). OTOH, time to write the programs does not overlap. Of course, since that paper was written Python has changed a lot. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'm asking because we were originally thinking about doing c# but after attending PyCon this year I'm reconsidering. We are already using Python for the website and I figure a c++ backend w/ a Python GUI may work really well, and would be pretty easy to port. Any opinions? Why drag in the C++ ? What do you intend to do in it that you can't do in python? Seems unnecessarily complex to me. And on a desktop, speed issues are kind of irrelevant - Python is snappy enough on modern hardware for most things. My style would be to have the gui connect via pipes to the local backend as a separate process, with a third process if there are any communications needed to off box dbs. But that is just the way I think - YMMV - Hendrik -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On Mar 11, 12:26 pm, David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) only one word caught my attention robust.. do u mean python is not robust??? if this is your feeling, i don't recommend u to reconsider anymore, turn back to ur previous programming language (what did'ya say it was??? c# .. i remember one ad. about it's robustness .. a piece of jelly!) and by the way if u know something about C++, code the GUI with QT (which would make it portable), and enjoy a high speed execution :P -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer a écrit : If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'm asking because we were originally thinking about doing c# but after attending PyCon this year I'm reconsidering. We are already using Python for the website and I figure a c++ backend w/ a Python GUI may work really well, and would be pretty easy to port. Any opinions? Yes : forget about the c++ backend. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer a écrit : On Mar 10, 10:52 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. Well we want it to be very robust, Which is a pretty good reason to favor Python over C or C++. and python isn't exactly the fastest language, or one with the lowest overhead :) It's not exactly one of the slowest languages nor one with the highest overhead neither. Chances are you'll have a fully-functional production level app in Python *way* before you have a first alpha in C++. If by then you *really* have some performance problem, it will be time to port the relevant modules to C extensions. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Python in a desktop environment
If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'm asking because we were originally thinking about doing c# but after attending PyCon this year I'm reconsidering. We are already using Python for the website and I figure a c++ backend w/ a Python GUI may work really well, and would be pretty easy to port. Any opinions? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
On Mar 10, 9:23 pm, David Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? Depending on what exactly you're trying to do, a pure python solution may be sufficient, though obviously a C/C++ backend would be portable as well. In terms of GUI; GTK or QT would probably be your best bet (my personal preference is for pygtk), though Wxidgets may be a viable option if the others are not (I'm not sure how advanced GTK/QT support is on OSX). Your question is kind of vague, so this response is vague as well. More info is needed to answer in a more specific way. Regards, Jordan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
Re: Python in a desktop environment
David Cramer wrote: If you had an application that you were about to begin development on which you wanted to be cross platform (at least Mac and Windows), would you suggest using c++ and Python? I'd strongly consider a pure python solution (I'd choose wxpython), but if I needed to code backend stuff in a lower level language I'd use C rather than C++. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
