Comment by jerf

8 years ago

Do the build processes mentioned in this email make heavy use of numpy, matplotlib, scipy, pickle, etc.?

NumPy is very exciting and all, but it's a subcommunity of the Python community, not 90% of its usage. NumPy users are probably not, in general, trying to spawn twenty five thousand processes in sequence to accomplish some task. The people who are complaining about fractions of a millisecond of startup time are not inverting massive matrices.

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jerf

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std_throwaway  8 years ago

People who are importing numpy usually are also not inverting massive matrices. These libraries provide tons of functionality that you would like to use in a short script. For people accustomed to these libraries the code is quick to write in a reliable fashion, easy to read but not quick to run. Everything is great except the startup time (and speed when you have more data).

  • jerf  8 years ago

    This group of people is so precise and exclusive that it is irrelevant. "People using NumPy for system scripting who are intensely sensitive to python startup time" is not a large enough group to be trying to argue Python-global policy with.

    "People using Python for system scripting who are intensely sensitive to python startup time" is at least large enough to be worth talking about (since speeding up startup time will mostly only help, modulo any possible resources spent to accomplish it), though I'd notice that it hasn't prevented Python from becoming very popular. And plenty of them will find that Go could meet their needs, in a hypothetical universe in which switching languages was free. (That is, I'm not particularly advocating it. It's a last resort for sure.)

    (Also this argument is predicated on the false assumption that Go has nothing like those things. They aren't as mature by any means, of course, and I generally consider them a bad idea [2], but they do exist.)

    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16959022

    • mratsim  8 years ago

      So precise and exclusive that it's irrelevant?

      Google, Facebook, Netflix, Uber, Amazon, Microsoft are all using Numpy in their data science pipelines, spinning and taking down dockers for ML-as-a-service. I'm pretty sure they care about startup time of both Go and Python.

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