> I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck?
I was talking about the overhead of making the list of packages to update/install. Pretending to install a simple package takes 7 seconds. Pretending to update takes 13 seconds. That's a very long time, because I might want to review the list of packages and make some changes, and every time I have to wait 13 seconds.
The compiling part is true, but that is not supervised.
I'm pretty sure the 'emerge -pv' performance is IO bound and would not be significantly improved by writing it in C.
It's been a while since I used Gentoo, but most of the serious users consider build-from-source as a feature and don't penalize portage for that. I believe your parent is referring to the sometimes annoyingly long dependency computation time of something like emerge -uDN world.
I was under the impression portage was "slow" (relative to other package management tools) due to the fact that it built everything from source (for which it uses make). Where is the Python bottleneck?
> In fact, give me a single big desktop software project made with a language that is not C or C++.
What constitutes "big"? There are a few large desktop projects that run on the JVM, for instance.