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Which is strange given the first version of bittorrent was written in Python. Also, the default torrent client in Ubuntu is Deluge, which is in Python too. I d

Which is strange given the first version of bittorrent was written in Python. Also, the default torrent client in Ubuntu is Deluge, which is in Python too. I download 20 torrents at 20M/s without any issue with it. But I get that using threads, downloading from 1000 clients is annoying to code, and indeed you are right, today with asyncio, the story is different. And I definitely understand the appeal of Go for network concurrency for a lot of projects. I just don't get how Python didn't fit the bill for this particular one. It's just a client, after all. Maybe I'm missing something.

kabdib 8y ago
First guess: Packaging and distributing python binaries is more difficult than it is with Go. (I like Python a lot; I've written tens of thousands of lines of it. But its code packaging systems leave much to be desired).
- sametmax 8y ago
  Oh yeah, no argument there. Even now with the fantastic nuitka that compiles Python seamlessly to a stand alone executable, you still don't have the cross compilation story go has. And you have to be careful with libc. But the thread is about highly scalable things, isn't it ?
- xapata 8y ago
  Packaging is inherently harder in Python, because of the emphasis on modularity. But conda does a good job. I've been very happy with Miniconda.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    We are talking about end user packaging. Lib packaging is a solved problem. For installing, people are just using pipenv. For creating, it's just an 2 lines setup.py file and a ini file to fill in now (http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#configuring-setup-using-setup-cfg-files http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#c...)
dewey 8y ago
Deluge is really bad with more torrents. After 1000 it's basically unusable. Most people who do long-term seeding use multiple instances of Transmission or rTorrent. There are some manager tools to help with that, these usually also do the balancing. I used to split them up with around 3000 seeding / client which worked fine.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Ah ok. That's a very specific use case though. Regular users won't do that. But i can understand that non asyncio python is not good for that specific usage.
charleslmunger 8y ago
Isn't deluge's actual torrent handling all implemented by libtorrent, which is c++?
- sametmax 8y ago
  Python is c. The ui is gtk which is c. Python is always mostly sugar on top of c.
anacrolix 8y ago
Yeah in it's early days, the torrent network was small, and peer counts were limited. The original, and many later Python implementations used event loops, which side step concurrency implementation overheads (like threads), and very often do a lot of heavy lifting in C. I'm not sure that Deluge is Python for the torrent part. The standard is to use libtorrent these days. Python can handle a torrent client with appropriate tools, but you just have to be extra careful about algorithms etc.

kabdib 8y ago

First guess: Packaging and distributing python binaries is more difficult than it is with Go. (I like Python a lot; I've written tens of thousands of lines of it. But its code packaging systems leave much to be desired).

sametmax 8y ago
Oh yeah, no argument there. Even now with the fantastic nuitka that compiles Python seamlessly to a stand alone executable, you still don't have the cross compilation story go has. And you have to be careful with libc. But the thread is about highly scalable things, isn't it ?
xapata 8y ago
Packaging is inherently harder in Python, because of the emphasis on modularity. But conda does a good job. I've been very happy with Miniconda.
- sametmax 8y ago
  We are talking about end user packaging. Lib packaging is a solved problem. For installing, people are just using pipenv. For creating, it's just an 2 lines setup.py file and a ini file to fill in now (http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#configuring-setup-using-setup-cfg-files http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html#c...)

dewey 8y ago

Deluge is really bad with more torrents. After 1000 it's basically unusable. Most people who do long-term seeding use multiple instances of Transmission or rTorrent. There are some manager tools to help with that, these usually also do the balancing. I used to split them up with around 3000 seeding / client which worked fine.

sametmax 8y ago
Ah ok. That's a very specific use case though. Regular users won't do that. But i can understand that non asyncio python is not good for that specific usage.

charleslmunger 8y ago

Isn't deluge's actual torrent handling all implemented by libtorrent, which is c++?

sametmax 8y ago
Python is c. The ui is gtk which is c. Python is always mostly sugar on top of c.

anacrolix 8y ago

Yeah in it's early days, the torrent network was small, and peer counts were limited. The original, and many later Python implementations used event loops, which side step concurrency implementation overheads (like threads), and very often do a lot of heavy lifting in C. I'm not sure that Deluge is Python for the torrent part. The standard is to use libtorrent these days. Python can handle a torrent client with appropriate tools, but you just have to be extra careful about algorithms etc.