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

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 3/20/15 3:50 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/20/2015 12:42 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> On Friday, 20 March 2015 at 05:17:11 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Sigh. The Python version:
>>> -----------
>>> import sys
>>>
>>> if __name__ == "__main__":
>>>     if (len(sys.argv) < 2):
>>>         sys.exit()
>>>     infile = open(sys.argv[1])
>>>     linect = 0
>>>     for line in infile:
>>>         linect += 1
>>>     print "There are %d lines" % linect
>>> ----------
>>> does not allocate memory. The splitLines() version:
>>> [...] cutted
>>
>> Of course it does allocate memory.
>>
>> Python's "for...in" makes use of iterators and generators, already
>> there you
>> have some allocations going around.
>>
>> Not only that, there is one string being allocated for each line in
>> the file
>> being read, even if it isn't used.
>
> Since 'line' is never referred to again after constructed, even a simple
> optimizer could elide it.

It's not elided to the best of my knowledge. But it's reference counted 
so it goes from 0 to 1 and back. A simple caching allocator will have no 
trouble with this pattern. -- Andrei