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Why is BIND 10 written in C++ and Python?

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Re: Why is BIND 10 written in C++ and Python?

#11

Post by stefantalpalaru »

misnome wrote: post #5
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #3

This doesn't look good for Python: "Whenever possible, we use Python" "When necessary, we use C++" "As of right now, it ends up that about 75% of our code is C++ and 17% is Python (link) since it turns out that a lot of BIND 10 is performance-critical."

Why doesn't it look good for python? As far as I'm aware, Python has never been advertised as a top-performance language, and part of the advantage has always been that you can rewrite performance-critical paths in c. Adding to this, the fact that BIND is something pretty performance-intensive, I don't think this makes it look bad at all.

Because the stated goal was to use Python "whenever possible" and judging by the python2 bashing at the end of the article, the author is a true believer yet the best he could do was 17% of the total code.

This also clashes with the belief in the Python community that performance is not an issue because you just rewrite those few critical sections in C/C++. How's 75% as one possible definition of "few"?

Re: Why is BIND 10 written in C++ and Python?

#13

Post by nicholassmith »

I think it's interesting that they did consider C and then decided it was too much of a risk. There's a constant theme of 'why use C++? C is faster and doesn't suck as much!' especially due to Linus' statements on the language, but often C is a technical risk as there's so much more that can go wrong. I'm not saying C++ is a better language than C, but it's definitely different and given the language is structured to be less of a headache I'm surprised it's often shot down over C anyway.

Re: Why is BIND 10 written in C++ and Python?

#15

Post by stefantalpalaru »

justin66 wrote: post #9
stefantalpalaru wrote: post #3

This doesn't look good for Python: "Whenever possible, we use Python" "When necessary, we use C++" "As of right now, it ends up that about 75% of our code is C++ and 17% is Python (link) since it turns out that a lot of BIND 10 is performance-critical."

I can see what you're saying but it's worth contemplating what percentage of the total codebase that Python code would represent if it were replaced by C++ code.

Point taken, but if by this metric the percentage replaced by C++ code is still bigger my original criticism still stands.

Re: Why is BIND 10 written in C++ and Python?

#16

Post by bnegreve »

EwanToo wrote: post #7

There's a comment in the post: "As of right now, it ends up that about 75% of our code is C++ and 17% is Python (link) since it turns out that a lot of BIND 10 is performance-critical." Which could easily be taken the wrong way. I believe the right way to think about it is "How much _more_ C++ code would there be, if there wasn't that 17% in Python?".

Hum, I don't think interpreting this comment as Python is not adequate for performance critical applications is misinterpretation. The author makes it very clear in some other part of the text:

> [Python] has all of the features that we were looking for… except performance.

Now your interpretation is also valid since they could have written everything in C++ but they didn't.

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