I haven't tried PythonCard myself, but as Cliff points out it surely must
have some significant overhead if it takes that long to load.
As a contrasting example, I have a little utility called 'Pymetrics' that
was written by an undergraduate who works for me. It's initial window
displays a couple of panels and a bunch of buttons. It takes about two
seconds to load (counting "thousand one ... thousand two" Done).
It does simple metrics on Python source files (number of files, lines,
non-commentary source lines, number of comments, number of imports ...)
on both a per file basis and then a summary. The results are displayed
nicely formatted in a wxHtmlWindow.
Running on 30 files containing about 11,000 total lines, it appears to take
no more than a second to do its processing *and* display the results.
The initial window in my text mining development platform displays a list
box, a notebook, and a bunch of image buttons. At startup it also opens a
couple of databases and then displays some stuff in the window after
getting the information out of the databases. It also seems to take only a
couple of seconds to come up.
All this is running on my IBM Thinkpad running (ugh!) NT. This is about as
fast as Notepad comes up, about as fast as Word, about as fast as Adobe
Acrobat, noticeably faster than Powerpoint, faster than PaintShop Pro, and
a lot faster than Excel.
Python (i.e., the interactive Python shell) seems to pop up in about a
second. So I think any slowness you have notice at this point is quite
application dependent and not really due to Python overhead. And keep in
mind that while Python is "interpreted" (in about the same sense that Java
is interpreted), most of wxPython runs at the compiled C level. So in
general the wxPython interface stuff can be expected to be very fast
indeed. And you're not going to optimize it much by screwing around with
anything at the Python level.
ยทยทยท
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Gary H. Merrill
Director and Principal Scientist, New Applications
Data Exploration Sciences
GlaxoSmithKline Inc.
(919) 483-8456