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Actually, Google tried to make Python faster, with Unladden Swallow project. They failed miserably. And several other projects failed miserably at the same th

by kjksf 9y ago

Actually, Google tried to make Python faster, with Unladden Swallow project. They failed miserably. And several other projects failed miserably at the same thing as well. Either way, speed was not the main reason they created Dart. Dart was designed for writing large web apps. Dart's top design constraints was good interop with JavaScript meaning transpilation of Dart to decent JavaScript and consumption of existing JavaScript libraries from Dart. I repeat: top design goal. You can't take a language (be it Python, Ruby or Lua) that was not design with that constraint in mind and magically make it work. There are transpilers from those languages to JavaScript but they are toys. You just can't reconcile Python semantics with JavaScript semantics in a reasonable way. So they did the next best thing: they designed a better Java/C# while keeping JavaScript interop as a priority. Now Dart is morphing because the top design goal is to make it the best language for cross-platform mobile (i.e. iOS and Android) apps, which requires different trade-offs.

skolemtotem 9y ago
> You just can't reconcile Python semantics with JavaScript semantics in a reasonable way. That's actually an interesting claim, and so I would really appreciate if you could provide a (possibly informal) proof that justifies it?
sametmax 9y ago
Pypy is proof that you can speed up Python considerably. And it's written in Python. Imagine what could be achieve if one would write something like that in, say, Rust ? My guess is that they didn't invest anywhere near the resources on unladden shallow (which was probably a side project) than they invested on chrome vm (which was a core project). Actually, I spend quite a lot of time on the Python mailling list, and here you can see they regularly find things to improve, perf wise. They just have terribly low resources. I've rarely seen a project as popular as Python, used by so many rich huge corporation, which such little resources actually. It's heart breaking.
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by kjksf 9y ago

skolemtotem 9y ago

> You just can't reconcile Python semantics with JavaScript semantics in a reasonable way. That's actually an interesting claim, and so I would really appreciate if you could provide a (possibly informal) proof that justifies it?

sametmax 9y ago

Pypy is proof that you can speed up Python considerably. And it's written in Python. Imagine what could be achieve if one would write something like that in, say, Rust ? My guess is that they didn't invest anywhere near the resources on unladden shallow (which was probably a side project) than they invested on chrome vm (which was a core project). Actually, I spend quite a lot of time on the Python mailling list, and here you can see they regularly find things to improve, perf wise. They just have terribly low resources. I've rarely seen a project as popular as Python, used by so many rich huge corporation, which such little resources actually. It's heart breaking.

deleted 9y ago
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