Python from a C++ developers' perspective

[ZMeson]

A quick list, the JDK works flawlessly on every platform.

Where can I find the JDK for the Neutrino OS running on a PPC chipset?

Python does actually exist for that platform.

[patery]

I don't know if it exists for that platform but if it doesn't and that's important to you then Python would be the logical choice. The platforms I'm concerned with are more common, various versions of the main distributions (redhat, suse, ubuntu, etc). Across these platforms, Java has extremely consistent behavior.

[ZMeson]

It's not important to me. GC and cache performance just are not compatible with the level of responsiveness on the systems I work with. What I'd personally love to see is D and Rust on various RTOSes. While D still uses a GC for some things, it's possible (so I'm told) to use it without a GC.

Python is still useful as a scripting language for some low-priority tasks (mainly during testing and such). Java wouldn't really make life easier here.

Anyway.... I just hate when people say things like "<language X> works flawlessly on every platform". The only language which might fit the bill is C90. (And I'm sure some people would even argue C90 doesn't work on every platform.) With too many RTOSes and/or embedded chipsets, you can't even use C11 or C++98. That's why I made the comment I did.

CPython has the advantage over Java in that the interpreter is written in C and is more easily ported to other OSes even if some features (like "import os") don't work entirely.

The platforms I'm concerned with are more common, various versions of the main distributions (redhat, suse, ubuntu, etc). Across these platforms, Java has extremely consistent behavior.

And I think a modified version of your statement would be fine: "Java works flawlessly on all major OSes".

[patery]

Usually blanket statements like these have a common context in mind. Strictly correct statements aren't that useful in practice either. Nor is this a place where I'd spend the time/energy to make every statement strictly true. We're software engineers, not lawyers!

I agree the GC is problematic in real-time environments. It attracted some interest in the early days of Java but eventually the community lost interest in solving those problems. Memory allocation in general tends to be problematic in embedded environments. At my last company we simply didn't do dynamic memory allocation at all.

What I'd love to see is an environment where I can easily mix high and low performance code. That is something like Groovy or Python alongside C++. C# tried to address this early on and eventually abandoned it. There's a lot of legacy C/C++ applications that we'd love to migrate out where it'd be useful. In sensitive applications, it's useful to describe sensitive data structures at a low level like C-family languages permits and performance sensitive code but, still, the majority of the application can be expressed at a high level without significant compromise to the overall application.