Hi Leonti, > I'm going to start developing for Openmoko, but there is one question > that is bothering me for quite a log time - is Python really good > choice for mobile device?
That depends on 'for whom': * For you? If you like Python, yes. If not, probably not, feel free to chose any other language available that you see fit. * For Openmoko? Yes, absolutely. That way we can quickly prototype our ideas for next-generation mobile devices. > Python has to load an instance of python for every script. What about > starting time of an application and memory consumption? Startup time is an issue, but you can always "cheat" by having multiple programs sharing one Python interpreter. > Is speed an issue for Python programs on Openmoko? Not really. The dbus framework seems snappy, e.g in ogsmd time is spent waiting for the modem, not on Python. Python's C modules are doing most the hard work. > > I'm especially interested in this question after I had used Dillo > browser. Any other even smallest application on OM is slower than > entire browser. Why is it so? Is it use of C or FLTK? Dillo is heavily optimized and uses a very lean toolkit. > > Please don't get me wrong - I love Python, and try to use it a lot on > my host comp, but there CPU and memory i not an issue. Compiled programs will often outperform their counterparts in Python; Once you start profiling and optimizing your algorithms though, combined with -- say -- replacing the 10 most called functions with their C-counterparts, you may find it being fast enough. Which is what actually counts. Always remember that -- although this still is an "embedded system", it has the processing power and internal memory that we used to have on our desktops only a couple of years ago. :M: _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
