Comment by patrec
8 years ago
> PyPy, which (being a JIT) has relatively slow startup
> time pypy -c 'print "Hello World"'
Hello World
pypy -c 'print "Hello World"' 0.08s user 0.04s system 96%
cpu 0.120 total
> time luajit -e 'io.write("Hello World!\n")'
Hello World!
luajit -e 'io.write("Hello World!\n")' 0.00s user 0.00s
system 0% cpu 0.002 total
Sometimes I wonder why we're not all using Lua instead of Python. Lua seems to get a strange amount of hate in some circles, but I've found both Lua and Python to be reasonably pleasant languages to work with.
From my personal account about Lua [1]:
> Three, the language is not a mere combination of syntax and semantics. Any evaluation should also account for user bases and ecosystem, and in my very humble opinion Lua spectacularly fails at both. I'm not going to assume the alternative reality---Lua has a sizable user base and its ecosystem is worse even for that user base.
> [...] The lack of quality library also means that you are even more risky when you are writing a small program (because you have less incentive to write it yourself). I have experienced multiple times that even the existing libraries (including the standard ones) had crucial flaws and no one seems to be bothered to fix that. Also in the embedded setting the use of snippets, rather than proper libraries, are more common as libraries can be harder to integrate, and unfortunately we are left with PHP-esque lua-users.org for Lua...
I think this critique still holds today, and unless miracle happens (like D), I doubt this is fixable.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13902023
I had a similar feeling a while back, but when I actually picked up Lua for a project I was shocked by how limited the standard library is. Third party libraries aside (which Python clearly has in spades), even just the standard library is pretty sparse. It makes sense, since Lua is at least partly motivated by being lean and embeddable, but it puts Lua in a completely different space for me.
Other folks complain about the lack of libraries. Personally, the two things which turn me off on Lua (luajit) are 1-based arrays and the conflation of hash-tables and array-lists into a single thing.
I don't like how everybody invents their own class system.
> the conflation of hash-tables and array-lists into a single thing.
Precisely, one of the things that turns me off on Python (coming from Lua), is the unnatural proliferation of different container types.
2 replies →
no batteries
Is ... that faster than CPython? Wow. Maybe I should symlink /usr/bin/python -> pypy on my laptop....
It's much slower. On my machine, "$PYTHON -c ''" (execute nothing) takes 60ms on Python 2.7, 80ms on 3.6 and 250ms on pypy.
It's not. You can test it on your system. In every case I've seen, Python starts up faster than PyPy. Neither takes a super long time.
PyPy has some great performance characteristics, but startup time isn't one of them.
Startup << warmup.