The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME [LWN.net]

The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME

Posted Jan 19, 2006 4:39 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)
In reply to: The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME by smitty_one_each
Parent article: The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME

Or possibly one born of years of experience writing apps in C and writing the equivalent apps in something else, and seeing how much more efficient writing in something other than C is. 10 lines of Python is so much nicer than 3000 lines of C, especially when they both do the same thing and have near identical runtime efficiency (as most of the work is done in library code, written in C).

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The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME

Posted Jan 19, 2006 10:50 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

I love Python as well, but the words 'Clearly' and 'core' in the quotation motivated the remark.

The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME

Posted Jan 19, 2006 23:01 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

'Near identical runtime efficiency' is true only in terms of absolute running time minus startup overhead. The 10 line Python program uses significantly more RAM (and has significant startup delay) compared to the 3000 line C program.

The .NET API patent, mono, and GNOME

Posted Jan 26, 2006 17:57 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

10 lines of Python is so much nicer than 3000 lines of C, especially when they both do the same thing and have near identical runtime efficiency (as most of the work is done in library code, written in C).

10 lines of C are so much nicer than 3000 lines of Python, too - what's your point?

And it seems pretty silly to count the library code in when you talk about 3000 lines of C but not when you talk about the 10 lines of Python, *especially* when you actually rely on the fact that all Python really does is call C code in order to be able to assert that Python does not impose a efficiency penalty...