Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)

> If they are so much better than, say, C, then why isn't a really common 
and important part of GNOME or KDE or Firefox or OpenOffice of GIMP 
written in them?

For all of these the reasons should be fairly obvious.

Gnome and KDE: I think the main thing is platform bindings, if the 
platform would be done in some given higher level language, how you would 
provide bindings for lower level languages?

As to Firefox, JS virtual machine and HTML rendering are performance 
critical functionality.  Writing VM in higher level language could also 
have "interesting" memory usage issues...  I  think performance are also 
issues why OpenOffice and Gimp *core* functionality is in C.

Note that except for Firefox (which extension language is quite 
understandably JavaScript), all of your examples provide Python bindings. 
In Gnome you can e.g. do panel applets in Python.

You find higher level languages where the ease of development and code 
maintainability are more important than their performance.  Performance 
includes startup speed which on higher level languages is higher due to 
need to load more things upfront.

For long running services, startup speed doesn't matter that much.  Also, 
on servers you don't run that many processes and you just add memory if 
it's needed whereas on Desktop too many services taking more memory starts 
to be noticeable.  That's why higher level languages are more used on 
servers and in education.


> if your language is only good at producing little web apps, then that 
seems kind of lame when talking about the greatness of the languages, 
especially compared to so many that do so much more.

Little?  What you consider little?  10 KLOCs?  100 KLOCs? Millions of 
lines of code?