Comment by rusakov-field
8 hours ago
Python is perfect as a "glue" language. "Inner Loops" that have to run efficiently is not where it shines, and I would write them in C or C++ and patch them with Python for access to the huge library base.
This is the "two language problem" ( I would like to hear from people who extensively used Julia by the way, which claims to solve this problem, does it really ?)
I have used Julia for my main language for years. Yes, it really does solve the two language problem. It really is as fast as C and as expressive as Python.
It then gives you a bunch of new problems. First and foremost that you now work in a niche language with fewer packages and fewer people who can maintain the code. Then you get the huge JIT latency. And deployment issues. And lack of static tooling which Rust and Python have.
For me, as a research software engineer writing performance sensitive code, those tradeoffs are worth it. For most people, it probably isn’t. But if you’re the kind of person who cares about the Python optimization ladder, you should look into Julia. It’s how I got hooked.
This problem has been solved already by Lisp, Scheme, Java, .NET, Eiffel, among others, with their pick and choose mix of JIT and AOT compiler toolchains and runtimes.