[PyKDE] Language Overhead: C++ vs Python

[Phil Thompson]

I've been meaning to do this for ages - maybe it will be useful for people
who are trying to convince management types how unproductive C++ is.

Please note, although the comparison here is with Python, I'm sure that
similar figures would be obtained for any similar language.

>From time to time we get commissioned to develop Python bindings for Qt
based widget sets. These often come with examples and part of the work is
to port those examples to Python. We then end up with C++ and Python
implementations with the same structure, the same functionality, and
calling the same API. Any difference in the amount of code is purely down
to "language overhead".

Below is a comparison of the numbers of lines of code for a number of such
examples. For the C++ implementations I have excluded all .pro files and
all qmake and moc generated files.

             C++   Python   Reduction
example_1    509     318       38%
example_2    871     516       41%
example_3    225     132       41%
example_4    142      72       49%
example_5    615     363       41%
example_6     56      46       18%
example_7   1445     764       47%
example_8    536     312       42%

Phil