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Python performance boosting project launched by Google

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Lashiec:
I guess that Google's purpose here is for building web-applications, just like the way they've built their own custom Javascript engine for Chrome?
-mnemonic (March 27, 2009, 03:29 AM)
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That, or merely Google employees doing something useful for their 20% of time for personal projects. IIRC Guido van Rossum works at Google, so there are plenty of reasons for doing it.

TheQwerty:
I think this was expected or at least they've been planning it for a while.  Google hired Guido, they chose Python for App Engine, and from what I've heard a lot of their employees are using Python for everyday tasks.  They've taken a liking to Python and have the resources to make it better meet their needs.

Also, it turns out Microsoft was at one time shipping a Python interpreter and some code as part of their Merchant Server.

40hz:
I've always found Python to be a bit of a pain to install, especially as each new point-release installs itself in it's own top-level directory.  I've had to reinstall everything on more than one occasion when environmental variables have got screwed up.

Then there's the whole issue with having to download libraries (e.g. wxPython for GUIs) and making sure you have the right version and it doesn't install itself in the incorrect high-level python directory.

-mnemonic (March 27, 2009, 03:29 AM)
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There's a guy by the name of Perica Zivkovic over at www.portablepython.com who has felt your pain. He's cooked up portable Python development packages for three different versions (2.5.4, 2.6.1 and 3.0.1) of Python.

 
Portable Python is distributed as an installation package file which contains complete latest Python® distribution for Windows together with a few help tools/IDE’s which will help you to run your python scripts from your portable device. So all you need to do is to download Portable Python installer file for python version you need, install it to your portable device and you are done! Everything is preconfigured so you can start working on your python application right away.


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I've only played with it (<2 hours writing some small apps :-\) so I can't really comment on how good Portable Python would be in a production environment. But from my limited experience, it does look promising.

Drop it on a 4GB USB key; add a few additional tools (portable versions of XAMPP, Notepad++, FileHamster, etc.); along with some PDF-format reference books and you'd have a nice little web development lab to take with you anywhere you went.

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