4 ms·
Rarely. Most tinkering tasks just don't have enough heavy duty computation in them to as much as strain a modern CPU. And most of the rest are covered by packag
by ACCount37 4mo ago
Rarely. Most tinkering tasks just don't have enough heavy duty computation in them to as much as strain a modern CPU. And most of the rest are covered by packages like numpy or pytorch.
For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib and call into it to get my numbers crunched. I get that Zig is a viable replacement for C there. But I don't see it replacing Python.
- p-e-w 4mo agoNot to mention that where heavy computation is required, Python often has libraries that are much, much faster than anything you can quickly hack together in C or Zig.
- maleldil 4mo agoAs long as you can express everything you need on the library's terms. As soon as you write a Python loop, your performance plummets.
- bluecalm 4mo agoOnly if you doing something thousands of people has done before. Anything new, even very simple and you are on your own and Python is 100x slower than naive C implementation on many tasks. Last little project I remember is writing a solver for a puzzle game my friend published. Python just doesn't work at all for such tasks. I think you are wrong about speed of those libraries as well. In my experience naive code designed for a specific task beats highly sophisticated general code and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to get huge speed-ups over some well established fast library.
- miki123211 4mo agoAnd if you really need more performance (or, more often, fast startup times), Go gives you 90% of the speed with 30% of the effort. Rust if you really want to squeeze everything that can possibly be squeezed of that CPU.
- pmarreck 4mo agothat’s not what the benchmarks say about Go, and based on multiple reports, Rust does not scale well into large codebases, which eventually become brittle and very difficult to change Zig is a return to “no magical effects,” except with reasonable safety
- Synthetic7346 4mo agoLink to said benchmarks?
- kibwen 4mo ago[flagged]
- 3836293648 4mo agoYou are entirely right here, you're also incredibly rude. Please don't bother replying when the only thing you're actually doing is being condescending and spreading negativity
- archargelod 4mo ago> For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib The problem is that most people using Python don't have enough expertise in C to do the same. It also kinda destroys the argument that Python is good if your solution for performance is to use a different language alongside it.
- itishappy 4mo agoThe argument is that the ergonomics of using Python are worth the squeeze of learning two languages. Are the ergonomics of using Zig really enough to justify replacing Python on the happy path, or would it end up replacing just C?
- tasuki 4mo agoI find Python extremely unergonomical. Sure, it's nice to read (pseudocode, yay!) and sure, its library ecosystem is beyond amazing. But... the LSPs I've tried (and I've tried a bunch!) are all atrocious: false positives and false negatives galore. Perhaps I'm spoiled by LSPs from languages with better type systems. Our code is strewn with (to me) mysterious comments such as `# NOQA 1234` which my colleague uses to make his Python tooling work with the codebase. I'm used to languages like Elm or Gleam in which a LSP error means there is an actual problem with your code, and a lack of a LSP error means the code will compile and run.
- lenkite 4mo agoEven if you are fine with Python's speed, its memory consumption DOES effect things and can be an extraordinary pain when you need to fit the result of your tinkering in any sort of constrained environment.
- maccard 4mo agoBy the time I’m memory constrained even on my laptop the processing cost of whatever I’m doing has gone beyond shoving it in the first scripting language I can find. Every device I write code on has at least 16GB RAM - most of them are 64 or 128