Comment on The C programming language is like debating a philosopher and Python is like debating someone who ate an edible

• Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  For us ludite lurkers who couldn’t figure it out from context alone, which one is the interpreted language? I got lost on that detail lol

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  • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Interpreted languages are languages that are compiled at run time. Compiled languages are compiled into binary by a compiler and then distributed as binaries.

    Basically with interpreted languages, there is huge overhead because the code has to be compiled (turned into machine code) as the program is running. This is why games and operating systems are written in C but people learn how to write Python and Java in their college classes. Interpreted languages are often much easier to learn then C and cross platform, but C is fast and powerful.

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    • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Technically speaking, interpreted languages aren’t compiled at all. That was the original definition.

      Nowadays, there’s hardly any clasically interpreted language. All major interpreted languages compile to bytecode, which is then run via a kind of VM that interprets that language. But many languages (like Java) go even farther and compile that bytecode into native machine code at runtime.

      Being interpreted, though, is an implementation feature, not a language feature. So, for example, if you use CPython, Python is compiled into bytecode when you first run a script. The bytecode is then stored and used the next time you run the same script as long as it hasn’t been changed in the meantime. You can also force the compilation to bytecode and only ship the bytecode.

      But if you use Pypy instead of CPython, it is a regular compiler that compiles into native machine code. No bytecode and/or interpretation in the process at all. This increases the performance of pure Python by around 5x, according to some benchmarks.

      But that kind of benchmarking is kinda flawed anyway because most real-life programs don’t only use pure Python.

      There’s a thing called Cython (not to be confused with the Python interpreter called CPython), which allows C-Code to be called from Python. Cython is used by almost all modules that contain performance-critical code, and it’s just as fast as using C directly.

      In most applications, you have a concept called “hot code”. That’s specific code paths that take up the vast majority of the code execution time (usually 95+% of the time are spent on just a few code paths). So when optimizing Python code, you figure out which these are and then you use Cython to implement them in C (or use a 3rd party module that already does that).

      Then you use Python only as a “glue code” that covers all the low-usage code.

      In that use case, Python is only marginally slower than C.

      Slow Python programs are usually an issue of optimization, not an issue of the language itself.

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Python has come a long way in recent years, I remember when android switched to an ahead of time compiler for its java.

        I really like lemmy. I usually learn something everyday. Thxs for that.

        My current project is trying to create a cool fork of mobian for the pinephone with overclocks and some other stuff, right now I’m editing the debt trees to get about 50% more performance for roughly the same battery life, out of the pinephone.

        With some other things, a bigger battery, and a custom modem firmware that can downclock the CPU in it, I’m getting 2% battery drain per hour with the screen off.

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    • Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Love you. Thank you

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Interpreted languages are very optimized these days, and get much closer to native C performance.

        Also thanks internet stranger. <3

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  • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Python is interpreted.

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• edinbruh@feddit.it ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I like many of your points, but your comment is facetious.

  You said it yourself, “it’s good for someone trying to bang out scripts”… and that’s it, that’s the main point, that’s the purpose of python. I will argue over my dead body that python is a trillion times better than sh/bash/zsh/fish/bat/powershell/whatever for writing scripts in all aspects except availability and if that’s a concern, the only options are the old Unix shell and bat (even with powershell you never know if you are stuck ps 5 or can use ps 7).

  I have a python script running 24/7 on a raspberry that listens on some mqtt topics and reacts accordingly asynchronously. It uses like 15kiB (literally less than 4 pages) of ram mostly for the interpreter, and it’s plenty responsive. It uses about two minutes of CPU time a day. I could have written it in rust or go, I know enough of both to do it, it would have been faster and more efficient, but it would have taken three times the time to write, and it would have been a bitch to modify, I could have done it in C and it would have been even worse. For that little extra efficiency it makes no sense.

  You argue it has no place in mainstream software, but that’s not really a matter of python, more a matter of bad software engineers. Ok, cool that you recognise the issue, but I’d rather you went after the million people shipping a full browser in every GUI application, than to the guys wasting 10 kiB of your ram to run python. And even in that case, it’s not an issue of JavaScript, but an issue of bad practices.

  P.S. “does one thing well” is a smokescreen to hide doing less stuff, you shouldn’t base your whole design philosophy on a quote from the 70s. That is the kind of shit SystemD hater shout, while running a display server that also manages input, opengl, a widget toolkit, remote desktop, and the entire printer stack. The more a high profile tool does, the less your janky glue code scripts need to do.

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  • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Python is okay for some things. It’s just that software in general has become terrible because there is so much wasted power being used because people have access to fast hardware. In the 90s your entire environment would use a few MBs of ram. I know with high res images some of this stuff would increase but people are so wasteful with how they write stuff these days. We are evolving backwards because we spend hundreds or thousands on amazing hardware only to have it run like trash in a world where everything is written in java and python and electron. No longer do developers optimize. They just get their webpage to run at a inconsistent 30 FPS on your $2000 computer, and collect their 150k salary, on a machine that has more computing power than every computer in the world put together in the 90s.

    It’s not just bad for your time and sanity. It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for the economy, this same rot is working it’s way into operating systems, into game engines. Every game written for UE5 seems to run at 50 FPS regardless of how good your PC hardware is because of these same low quality programmers and terrible tools. Idk Linux to me has been a breath of fresh air in recent times as bad as it can be. It’s mostly C code with tiny binaries that are like 1-3 MB usually. I guess there is a silver lining to it in that all of these evil corporations like Google and meta and apple are dying because of this. Maybe the internet will go back to being centered around user content in a distributed fashion and not just a couple of highly controlled websites that try to brainwash you into supporting your corporate backed government. It already seems like every triple A game studio sucks and all the best games that have come out in the past 15 years have been from small indie studios.

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    • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Have you heard of the term “Software crisis”?

      We don’t really talk all that much about it any more, because it’s become so normal, but the software crisis was the point where computers became faster than human programmers. That problem came up in the 1960.

      Up until then a computer was simple enough that a single human being could actually understand everything that happened under the hood and could write near-optimal code by hand.

      Since then computers doubled in performance and memory every few years, while developers have largely stayed human with human performance. It’s impossible for a single human being to understand everything that happens inside a computer.

      That’s why ever since we have tried optimizing for developer time over execution time.

      We have been using higher-level languages, frameworks, middlewares and so on to cut the time it takes to develop stuff.

      I mean, sure, we could develop like in the 90s, the tools are all still there, but neither management nor customers would accept that, for multiple reasons:

      • Everyone wants flashy, pretty, animated things. That takes an ungodly amount of performance and work. Nobody is ok with just simple flat unanimated stuff, let alone text-based tools.
      • Stuff needs to run on all sorts of devices: ARM smartphones, ARM/x86 tablets, ARM/x86 PCs, all supporting various versions of Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and preferrably also Linux. But we also need a web version, at best running on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You could develop all of these apps natively, but then you’d need roughly 20 apps, all of them developed natively by dedicated experts. Or you develop the app on top of browsers/electron and have a single app.
      • Stuff needs to work. Win95-level garbage software is not ok any more. If you remember Win95/98 fondly, I urge you to boot it up in a virtual machine some time. That shit is unacceptably buggy. Every time the OS crashes (which happens all the time) you are playing russian roulette with your partition.
      • Did I mention that everything needs to be free? Nobody wants to pay for software any more. Win95 was $199 ($432 in 2025 money) and Office was $499 ($1061 in 2025 money). Would you pay 1.5k just for Win11 and the current office?

      So there’s more and more to do with less and less time and money.

      We can square that circle by either reducing software quality into nothingness, or by using higher-level developer tools, that allow for faster and less error-prone develoment while utilizing the performance that still grows exponentially.

      What would you choose?

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      But ultimately, it’s still the customer’s choice. You don’t have to use VSCode (which runs on Electron). You can still use KATE. You don’t have to use Windows or Gnome or MacOS. You can use Linux and run something like IceWM on it. You don’t have to use the newest MS Office, you can use Office 2013 or Libre Office.

      For pretty much any Electron app out there, there’s a native alternative.

      But it’s likely you don’t use them. Why is that? Do you actually prefer the flashy, pretty, newer alternative, that looks and feels better?

      And maybe question why it feels so hard to pay €5 for a mobile app, and why you choose the free option over the paid one.

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I actually pay for software but I run Linux, I’m not paying for windows because it’s bad. I prefer to pay then have ads. I value my time.

        What you are saying is somewhat true. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers these days if not millions. The quality of the person who writes software just isn’t what it used to be. Not that they don’t work hard, but just that they aren’t capable of writing C.

        You also can understand everything in a system, at least some people can. I understand those people are rare and expensive to hire.

        One thing C really lacks is modern libraries to do these things. It’s not a limitation of C itself it’s just that most modern tools are targeted towards other languages. I understand that writing webapps in C isn’t the best idea because you don’t want web stuff running on hardware directly most of the time if you care about security anyways, but it’s really just a trend where the industry moved away from C with all of its frameworks and stuff which has not been good for the users.

        Windows 98 was really good if you knew how it worked. I never had any issues really with stuff like XP. It always worked, it was always fast, it was always stable. I used XP for probably 10 years and never had any issues with instability and stuff and I was constantly modifying stuff, overclocking, patching drivers, modding bios, doing weird stuff that others didn’t do coming up with my own solutions. It worked really well. It’s modern windows that’s a buggy mess that crashes all the time.

        To get back to the other point though, to move away from C was a mistake. It’s not that much more complicated than using other languages. Most of the complexity was just in setting up the environment which was admittedly terrible under C. Trying to link libraries and stuff. The actual code itself is not really that much more difficult than say python, but it’s a different paradigm. You are getting closer to the hardware, and it’s not automatic that your code is going to be cross platform unless you use platform agnostic libraries. It’s entirely possible to write multiplatform code in C and most programs could be written in a multiplatform way if users use libraries that target multiplatform development and let users compile them ahead of time. It’s just that companies like Microsoft created proprietary junk like .net and direct X which made writing multiplatform code much harder if you didn’t start with libraries like it or gtk, and openGL. Again, this was never a fault of C. You could even have a standard in CPUs that would run any code to bootstrap a compiler and you could have platform agnostic binaries, which is just something that never happened because there was not really a point to it since so much code was written in lockdown .net and directx.

        Interpreted language were intended to solve those issues. Making platform agnostic code, and to make code that was safe to run from websites without compromising the integrity of the users root filesystem, but these are terrible solutions. Especially as interpreted languages moved beyond web stuff and small simple apps to being used everywhere and integrated into every part of the system.

        Python is a scripting language. It’s best used to call C libraries or to write very lightweight apps that don’t depend on low level hardware access. Java is like C but worse. JavaScript is like the worst of all worlds, strongly typed, verbose, picky about syntax, slow, interpreted, insecure, bloated, but it is cross platform which was originally probably why it was so popular. That should have just been added to C however. When you have code that runs 10x-10,000 times slower and you have bad programmers who don’t know how to write code that doesn’t destroy the bus, or use 100% of your system resources for no benefit, you end up in this mess we have today, for every app that uses 100% of your memory bandwidth, that halves the speed of the next program. If you have 3 programs running that peg then Emory bus, that means your next program is going to run at 0.25 the speed roughly. This is not how software should be written.

        Python can also be great for prototyping algorithms and stuff, automating things that run once, not in loops. However once you figure it out, it should be written in C. All of these libraries that are written for the modern web should have been written to target C.

        The cool thing about C is you can use it like basic if you really want. With a bit more syntax, but you don’t have to use it with classes. You can just allocate memory on stack and heap and then delete all of it with like one class if you really want to. Everything that’s cool about other languages mostly just already exists in C.

        It’s kind of amazing to see the difference between a Linux smartphone and an android smartphone these days. A Linux smartphone running terrible hardware by today’s standard is just instant. 32 GBs of storage is enough to add everything you want to the operating systems because binaries are like 2 MB. Then that all goes away as soon as you open a web browser. A single website just kills it. Then you sit down on a modern windows machine and everything is slow and buggy as shit. It draws 500w of power on a 2nm process node. It’s a real issue. No amount of computer power will ever overcome interpreted languages because people will always do the minimum possible work to get it to run at an unstable 30 FPS and call it good.

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• realitista@lemmus.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Uses less memory until it inevitably springs a memory leak.

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  • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Assembly isn’t really faster than C in many cases, although it is in some cases, C actually compiles to assembly basically. The speed ups you get from assembly come from the fact that you can hand optimize some things that compilers miss, and it can be useful sometimes, like when writing a very high performance part of software like a game rendering loop or something.

    Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.

    Memory leaks are an issue with all programming languages, although some use what’s called a garbage collector to handle memory which can be okay with some things but terrible in other things like real time software, operating systems, video games, or just anything you don’t want to hitch and lag and run like a turd. Garbage collectors aren’t some magic fix to memory management, if so they would be a part of C. There are huge tradeoffs to not managing your own memory. If you are using c with objects, then you are pretty safe. The object oriented nature of the language makes it very easy to manage memory. That’s mostly what it’s there for besides reducing the amount of redundant code, if you are using inheritance like you are supposed to. This is called a node graph. You store your data under objects so when you want to remove your data you just call a recursive free function on the highest parent object.

    The difference really is that C code is efficient, in the sense that it doesn’t waste anything. Every thing that seems low level about C is there for a reason. It came from a time where it was important to write code efficiently. Where every MB and cycle counted. Where having a garbage collector freeing and potentially crashing your operating system was unacceptable as well as extremely slow. It’s still slow btw, because programs have scaled with the ability of hardware to run it, so garbage collectors are still mostly as terrible as they always have been.

    C is only low level in the sense that it actually runs on the hardware. There isn’t layers of stuff in-between it and the hardware. There is no good reason to do so, outside of maybe security in some context. You don’t want web resources running on your hardware directly.

    All the other stuff that comes with modern languages is mostly nonsense. Type checking is for lazy programmers. It multiplies the time needed to do an operation. There is no good reason for it to exist other than programmers being bad at their job. C is loosely typed btw. It checks types in the compiler where it belongs. If your android phone was written in c++, your battery would last for days, and you could play games on it for hours, and everything would be extremely fast, nearly instant loading of stuff. The reason we pages were written in JiT languages was mainly just for comparability across many different types of hardware and browsers. They were also relatively small programs. Scripting can be useful sometimes, garbage collectors can be useful for script kitty stuff. It has no place in mainstream software and definitely not in operating systems. Google went from “Don’t be evil” to let’s build an entire operating system out of java and spyware. It’s not good. At this rate we aren’t even going to have guis anymore in 10 years because no hardware will be able to run it without destroying itself, and needing to be plugged in constantly, and $1000 worth of ram.

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    • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Perfect C is faster than perfect Python, same as perfect assembly is faster than perfect C.

      But in the real world we don’t write perfect code. We have deadlines, we have constantly shifting priorities, we have non-technical managers dictating technical implementations. We have temporary prototype code that ended up being the backbone of a 20 year project because management overpromised and some overworked developer had to deliver real fast. We have managers still believing in the mythical man month (“If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, 9 women only need a single month to make one”) and we have constant cycles of outsourcing and then insourcing again.

      With all that garbage going on we end up with a lot of “good enough for now”, completely independent of “laziness” or “low-skill” of developers. In fact, burnout is incredibly common among software developers, because they aren’t lazy and they want to write good software, but they get caught in the gears of the grind until they get to a mental breakdown.

      And since nobody has the time to write perfect code, we end up with flawed and suboptimal code. And suboptimal assembly is much worse than suboptimal C, which is again much worse than suboptimal Python.

      If your Python code is suboptimal it might consume 10x as much RAM as it needs. If your C code is suboptimal, it memory-leaks and uses up all RAM your PC has.

      If your Python code is buggy, something in the app won’t work, or worst case the app crashes. If your C code is buggy, some hacker just took over your PC because they exploited a buffer overflow to execute any code they want.

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      The main issues with software performance are:

      • Management doesn’t plan right and developers need to do with what they have
      • Companies don’t want to spend incredible amounts of money on development to make things perfect
      • Companies want products to be released in time
      • Customers aren’t happy with simple things. They want pretty, fancy things

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Perfect assembly is marginally faster than perfect C, but perfect C is way faster than perfect python. You have many valid points though. Also C can be very safe if you don’t use the standard string libraries and stuff. It depends on what you are trying to do. Sometimes it’s worth giving up safety to have a better program.

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    • realitista@lemmus.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Python uses 10x the memory but probably 100x-1000x the CPU cycles to do the same thing. Also using libraries written for interpreted languages is going to bloat your memory footprint where c libraries are tiny and efficient.

      You’ve obviously never looked at benchmarks because you’re one or two orders of magnitude off.

      As someone who was trained in C and did most of my programming in it, yes it does everything you need but it’s a major pain in the ass doing it well. It’s slow to get things done and you need decades to get competent at it. Python allows you to get up and running a lot faster.

      As cpu and ram are cheap compared to the days when C was a necessity, most programmers have made the decision that getting things going fast and easy was worth the trade off. The market has spoken. There is still a place for C or Rust, but there’s also a place for Python and other interpreted languages. You can make good programs in both but it’s a lot easier to make a garbage program in C.

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      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Python is really that much slower. It has actually come a long way in the past few years but it’s still a interpreted, strongly typed language. You can use libraries that are written in C or rust or something to make python run much faster but anything you write in actual Python is extremely slow. It can be okay for scripting, like basically bash, but it’s not really good for a programing language and writing applications in it is not good unless it’s a small project made by one programmer that does a specific useful thing.

        Software really is getting terrible. We are hitting a wall in terms of refining process nodes further because we are at 2 nm and it’s really difficult to keep going. There is already way too much terrible code out there just destroying really powerful systems. We are evolving backwards, boot times in the early 2000s on low end hardware were a few seconds for windows XP. When I clicked an application, it either opened nearly instantly or within a couple seconds. It was a much better operating system than windows 10 ever will be.

        The issue is having even a single piece of python or java or electron can just completely saturate your memory bus and halve the speed of every operation you do. i had a PC that had spotty thermal paste but long ago and opening discord would overheat it lol.

        All I’m saying is that writing this type of code for production shouldn’t really be acceptable. It would be nice if we actually benefited from advancing computer technology and new hardware wasn’t just an excuse to write worse software. I think operating systems should warn the users when running terrible code, that this program is low quality and will slow down the system or is taking as much resources as it can. We are in the age of 1000w computers with billions of transitions being taken out by webpages and OS spyware. The standards are just far too low. There is too much terrible software being written because companies are desperate to hire people who have no idea how to program in real languages instead of paying for real programmers or helping people learn to code in those languages and many of these companies are billion dollar companies.

        Like I said, it’s bad for the user, it’s bad for the environment, it bad for your hardrives, and it’s bad for the economy. Not to go full terry Davis on you but computers should boot in under a second these days.

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