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Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)Posted Feb 10, 2008 21:28 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359)In reply to: Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) by tjc Parent article: Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News)
Both Python and Ruby, at least in their original native-C implementations, are pretty poorly thought out in regard to multithreading. Multicore CPUs are steadily becoming things of today, so initial design flaws of these languages are quite alarming as they are going to make them useless in the new world. AFAIK, their Java&.Net rewrites (Jython/JRuby/IronPython/Ruby.Net) use underlying threading facilities so they have more chances to succeed. But such reimplementations significantly change their original class/modules system also to adapt it to the underlying platform. As well this reduces their "dynamicity" in some extent. As to "dynamicity", Ruby feels much more flexible and ductile than Python (the whole Rails framework is largely built upon these features). But the resulting "overly-dynamic" programs often consume more CPU time and RAM to run than equally-functional but somewhat dumbed-down and task-specific implementation in Python. And the last my word would be about Amarok. I tried to use version 1.4.7 as provided by Ubuntu gutsy, and it has been capable to eat the whole my CPU (Duron 1800) just sitting idle. You know, it likes to redraw a matrix of small grey/blue squares on its spectrogram indicator. Completely useless bling, but this keeps Amarok and X server busy all the time. I would like this to be turned off by default. Else, so far I prefer xine&mplayer as much lighter solutions.
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Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) Posted Feb 11, 2008 2:09 UTC (Mon) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] > Both Python and Ruby, at least in their original native-C implementations, are pretty poorly thought out in regard to multithreading. Multicore CPUs are steadily becoming things of today, so initial design flaws of these languages are quite alarming as they are going to make them useless in the new world. Multithreading is mostly to gain more speed, and these kind of languages are not really created for speed. If you waste your CPU time already, you can as well waste some wall clock time as well -- after all, you're supposed to waste just a neglectible amount of time anyway, or else it'd be stupid to write the program in a scripted language in the first place. The only realistic use for multithreading in a scripted language I can think of is to run some other process/blocking syscall and wait for it to finish, and these tasks are handled quite alright already. Otherwise, if some guy would ever proudly tell me that he had successfully parallelized his Python program and it now runs two times faster, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing, even with tears in my eyes, because it's just hilarious!
Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) Posted Feb 11, 2008 19:31 UTC (Mon) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link] At the same time, other systems using portable bytecode (Java, .Net) throw a lot of efforts into JIT compilation and runtime optimization (like Hotspot JVM), as well as multithreading performance (have a look into JDK/JRE sources, you'll notice a lot of low-level tricks there). What make their developers do so ? In fact, reimplementing your dynamic language in Java instead of C often allows you to use these processor- and system-specific optimizations implemented by JDK/JRE developers itself.
Interview: Mark "Markey" Kretschmann (Not the Gentoo Weekly News) Posted Feb 12, 2008 1:07 UTC (Tue) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] Start with JIT first, then do proper multithreading. Guido haven't done the first, neither he cared much about the second -- apparently, the speed didn't matter to him. For me, it's a sign of a sane person, a person who understands his objectives. After all, no one is writing JIT compilers for shell scripts. Actually, I think shell scripting is an outstanding example of what scripted languages are good for; not that I like shell syntax, implicit vars etc -- but the idea is just right.
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