A few notes on choosing between Go and D for a quick project

[Chris via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 14 March 2015 at 18:01:57 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-03-14 at 17:22 +0000, Chris via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
> […]
>> 
>> Unfortunately, for speech and language processing (synthesis, 
>> speech recognition etc) Python is too slow. Everybody uses 
>> Python at first, but the serious code that is later put into 
>> real world applications is usually written in C or C++. This 
>> is a fact. I know people who developed speech analysis 
>> frameworks in Python and are now thinking of rewriting it in 
>> C++ for commercial purposes.
>
> I can believe it is believed to be true, but this is based on 
> metrics
> for using only pure Python. I bet you can get good performance 
> just with
> judicious profiling and use of Cython or better still Numba.
>
> "Commercial reasons" may well include "we are not prepared to 
> ship
> Python source code, so you will rewrite in C or C++ so we can 
> ship a
> binary executable" and be nothing to do with performance. I 
> have had
> this in the past.

This may be part of it. But I know that open source free software 
in this sector is also written in C/C++ or Java. I haven't seen a 
single system that was acceptable in Python. Sooner or later they 
all go back to C.

I just don't see the point in using Python only to rewrite 
performance critical parts in C/C++ or D. Why not start with D or 
C from scratch. Also, I know that this Cython and C module mixing 
becomes a mess very quickly which makes development tricky and 
deployment a pain in the a**. I believe that as soon as you have 
to mix languages like that, there is something wrong, and you 
begin to rely heavily on an infrastructure that helps you to keep 
track of the whole mess.

>
>> Python is good for protoyping, but if you need fast 
>> applications, it is usually C/C++ (or D).
>
> If you just use pure Python yes. But no-one does. it is always 
> mixed
> systems. Why rewrite the Python that is not performance 
> critical in C, C
> ++, or D, there is no point.