[Info-vax] Python for x86?

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 4/13/2023 6:44 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> Actually, the original author, Guido van Rossum, was hired by Google
> for no other reason than to port python2 up tp python3 along the
> lines that google wanted. As an enticement, he was told to work on
> python3 only in the mornings so would be allowed to work on anything
> else the rest of the day. IIRC, he stayed in that roll for seven
> years.

Yes. According to wikipedia:

CWI -2005
Google 2005-2012
Dropbox 2012-2019
retired 2019-2020
Microsoft 2020-

> And although python is used to do a lot of admin scripting on Linux
> platforms (tools like "yum" and "firewall-cmd" are written in
> python), python does a really good job supporting server-side
> scripting under apache cgi-bin. I don't know how this is possible,
> but python programs are faster than compiled DEC-BASIC programs
> started via apache.

That is unexpected. If both are run via CGI mechanism then
script activation should be the same. And compiled code should be
faster than interpreted code. And if libraries used are also the
same then it is a mystery.

High performance Python web services would use Flask or
something similar to avoid the activation overhead.

> So IMHO python3 on OpenVMS is a must-have.

Absolutely.

Python is a very important language today.

And it has to be Python 3 as Python 2 is obsolete.

Arne