Hacker News Reader

Comment by SingAlong | Hacker News Reader

Now the important question, will it hurt frame rate if games are developed using Python instead of Java for android?

Do you have some reason to believe that Google seriously hosed the Java implementation on Android or these guys have massively increased the efficiency of the Python implementation? Otherwise, it seems the answer would have to be yes.. the same algorithm will usually perform (much) worse in Python than in Java.

Note I don't mean to slam Python here.. just being practical. Python's my primary language. Development efficiency usually trumps execution inefficiency.

a python interface to a lower level rendering library could mitigate most of that effect.

otoh, serious game writing is pretty hardcore tech, cutting-edge game devs probably won't jump into python right away.

Python is going to chug even on relatively simple action games. I did write some 2D stuff in Pygame/SDL and Pygame/OpenGL back in the early-mid 2000s that could do 30FPS, but to do it was akin to writing in BASIC on an 8-bit; you had to micro-optimize in a fairly brutal way, one which obscured Python's powers. Things like rendering a tilemap could get huge speed boosts simply by avoiding nested loops in favor of a cache. Even using OpenGL wasn't really enough to secure a comfortable margin of performance.

If I did it again I would have an easier time because I missed a few critical constructs back then(most notably, the array package). It still wouldn't be pretty, especially not on a phone.

No bother.. Most cutting edge game devs wouldn't jump into Android right away either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com