Re: Why GNOME uses C?

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Peter wrote:

>But what was very strangely for me that there were advices to program for
>gnome in Python or C#. IIRC these languages do not need their
>programs to be compiled (sorry I fogot the right term) to run them. So
>this are the different languages, and if we want fast program (desktop)
>it's better to avoid such languages. Did I miss anything? So why there
>were such advices?
>  
>
If you take a look at your average GUI program, you will find that they
are idle 99% of the time.  They are waiting on events telling them
things like:

    * the user pressed a key on the keyboard
    * the user pressed a button on the mouse
    * the mouse moved
    * a certain area of the window needs to be repainted
    * etc

Interpreted languages like Python can sit doing nothing just as
efficiently as C programs for the most part, so it works quite well for
desktop applications.

That isn't to say that there aren't cases where the speed difference
between C and Python is a problem.  However if you run into such a
situation, it is possible to rewrite the time-critical section in C, and
make it available as a Python extension (chances are that you won't need
to do this though ...)

James.