13 replies to this topic

[Stripes Fan]

First off let me say Hi to everyone at codecall since I'm new here. Anyways I was wondering what would be the fastest/easiest language to code a proof of concept compression method on? I'm not looking for anything as complex as C. I know dot net can be bulky so I was thinking something like perl or java but I'm not quite sure what to go with or if those would be good choices. By "fastest" I mean something that won't take forever to compress/decompress with once I've finished my project. I'm moderately experienced in PHP but confident I can do this on a learn as I code basis.

[Lop]

Why don't you use PHP? It would be easier than learning a new language. Other than that I recommend Java over Perl.

[monkey_instinct]

I would not recommend PHP as an application programming language. Why don't you try Python. It easy to learn, and it's a great language.

[v0id]

I wouldn't go for PHP neither. It has never been known as being fast, and in my opinion there's better alternatives. I would, like monkey_instinct, suggest Python.

[WingedPanther]

If you're looking for something that will run quickly, C, C++, or a Pascal derivative may be your best bet. I'm just thinking about how some of the compression algorithms work, and know you'll probably need something that gives you the ability to view data as a bit array.

[G_Morgan]

C or C++ are the best performing languages. After that I'd say things like Ocaml, Haskell and Lisp perform reasonably well (about half the speed of C) then Python and Perl are about 10 times slower than C, Ruby stands on it's own as being the slowest of the slow and is significantly slower than Python and Perl.

Java and C# fit in around the same level as Ocaml, Haskell and Lisp but if you are going to use them you may as well use C++.

[Lop]

What kind of applications can you do with Python? I've never seen a GUI library for it so you would be bound to console programs only.

[G_Morgan]

Lop said:

What kind of applications can you do with Python? I've never seen a GUI library for it so you would be bound to console programs only.

Python has excellent facilities for linking to C code. So you could bind to any GUI API that is accessible via C. On Linux systems there are whole hosts of C modules for it, including Gtk+.

On Windows I'm not certain, Python (like most programming languages) grew up around Unix so isn't nearly as good on Windows which is generally an awful platform to program for (Win32 API is awful, .Net brings it about to where the rest of the programming world has been for the last few decades in terms of sane API's).

I'd see if there's a Gtk+ module built for Windows.

[v0id]

Python also has a standard GUI toolkit, Tkinter, which comes with Python.

[monkey_instinct]

Tkinter is not exactly the standard GUI toolkit for python, it just happen to come bundled with the installer for Windows machines. But it may be considered the standard GUI for Python. Python have many other GUI toolkits. The one I like the most is PyGTK which is a bidding for GTK+. There's another one that's pretty good too which is called wxPython. It's the wxWidget for Python. As well as wxWidgets, wxPython works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. There're other toolkits but these I think are the most used.

[v0id]

I said that Tkinter was the standard GUI toolkit, exactly because it comes with the official Python package. Not only for Windows, but also for Linux. I don't know about other platforms.

I prefer wxWidgets, like you mentioned. I haven't used it much with Python though, only with C++, but I don't think there's the big difference, except for the syntax of course.

[monkey_instinct]

I haven't used wxWidgets a lot, actually I haven't program in C++ for a while, but wxPython is really good. It seems like Python and wxWidgets were meant to be together.