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What are the kinds of software that are not advisable to be developed using Python?

Chris Angelico rosuav at gmail.com
Sat Feb 8 23:14:36 EST 2014 
On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Michael Torrie <torriem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 02/08/2014 05:11 PM, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Sam <lightaiyee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I got to know about Python a few months ago and today, I want to develop only using Python because of its code readability. This is not a healthy bias. To play my own devil's advocate, I have a question. What are the kinds of software that are not advisable to be developed using Python?
>>>
>>
>> Device drivers and operating systems. Definitely don't try writing
>> those in pure Python.
>
> That all depends. Driving a USB device using libusb and Python might
> just be the ticket to get things up and running quickly.  At one time
> someone wrote a Linux kernel module that allowed you to use Perl to
> implement some kinds of driver things.

That's not the same; libusb is doing the low-level handling for you.
That's not the sense of "device driver" that gets really close to the
metal. I'm talking about real-time response to signals, I/O port and
interrupt handling, that kind of thing. The device driver will then
expose a higher-level API, maybe as a /dev/something openable, and
Python can control the device using that.

And that's something that Python *is* good at. I wouldn't use Python
to write a device driver for an RTL8169 card, but if I have that card
in my computer, I will totally use Python to create a network
connection and transfer data. I'm just not going to concern myself
with the low-level details when I do. :)

ChrisA
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