

Where are the fast dynamic languages? - polar
http://www.martincmartin.com/blog/?p=77

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ardit33
Lua? It is very simple language. Unfortunately, there is a performance penalty
with dynamic langues, which wont go away.

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maximilian
Here is a good discussion about using Lua to script stuff for embedded or cell
phone development: <http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2007-11/msg00248.html>

Its an interesting read. Lua seems pretty sweet!

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ardit33
maximilian, we are already doing that.

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maximilian
doing..? hacking cell phone software in Lua? I'd love to have at some embedded
stuff with a non-c language. So much less to worry about screwing up. Although
a lot of embedded stuff is hardware level stuff that has to be done in c
anyway, so no lua there.

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ardit33
yes. Maybe we will release the interpreter part open source., but it is not
done yet. Basically a J2ME and C++ (for brew and palm), interpreter for lua.
The whole idea, is that you can build an app once in Lua, and run it
everywhere (for reals). This is a company thing, (we are not a small startup),
so I am not sure how much of it will be realeased open source.

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baha_man
Does anyone here have a single example of a performance problem caused by
using a 'dynamic' language rather than a 'static' language? The only
performance problems I've ever encountered 'in the wild' have been down to
things like database access, I/O, bad sorting algorithms, string
concatenation, etc.

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sah
Fundamental limitations of Python are responsible for most of the memory
footprint and performance difference between the old official Python
implementation of BitTorrent and C++ implementations like libtorrent. The kind
of obsessive optimization that made uTorrent so tiny and fast is just not
achievable in Python, due to things like per-object memory overhead and
reference counting.

I've also done audio processing projects in Python, and ended up switching to
D because Python couldn't do floating point additions and multiplications
across large lists fast enough.

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pius
Here, for starters:

<http://www.strongtalk.org/> <http://rubini.us/> <http://www.cons.org/cmucl/>

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mhartl
Solving this problem is the main goal of the Cobra language:

<http://cobra-language.com/docs/why/>

I'll be curious to see if it succeeds.

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mullr
Thanks for the link, that is an interesting language. It seems like it's
mostly a lot of C# features / programming style with python syntax and
optional dynamic typing. Generally a good idea, though the code samples didn't
feel right to me - lack of punctuation, perhaps? Maybe I've just gotten used
to symbol-filled code.

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vegai
<http://www.factorcode.org>

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hugov
Objective-C?

