Vala/Genie versus Python opinion piece

[btiffin]

This is fairly impressive.

tightloop.gs compiled with valac tightloop.gs

code:

[indent=4] init     var a = 0     var b = 100000000     while a < b         a++     print "%d\n", a

and a run rate on my little box

code:

$ valac tightloop.gs $ time ./tightloop 100000000 real    0m0.282s user    0m0.276s sys     0m0.004s

compared to some similar Python

code:

#!/usr/bin/env python a = 0 b = 100000000 while a < b:     a += 1 print a

and a runtime of...

code:

$ time ./tightloop.py 100000000 real    0m16.695s user    0m16.678s sys     0m0.011s

...ok then; that's only 60 times slower than Genie at counting to 100 million.

crusty old guy raving ahead
It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd opine that Pythonistas should be taking a serious look at Vala/Genie developments. They are not at a 1.0 reference implementation yet, so there is still time to help out and perhaps influence the languages. http://live.gnome.org/Genie

Cheers

[rdrake]

While it seems impressive, it's certainly not surprising given the whole compiled vs. interpreted thing.

Still I've been tempted to look into Vala, especially since its syntax is apparently heavily influenced by C#. If either of these languages had the same backing as Python I'd be much more inclined to use them.