Portable Languages

[DasFool]

That is my main gripe with Python. Because it has its own garbage collection scheme it's hard, if not impossible to do any real memory management. This isn't really a problem on desktops that are often running with 1-2gb of ram but it can be a hurdle when programming for handheld systems packing a whopping 64-128mb of memory (some of which is being monopolized by the OS).

The common practice with image based sprites in pygame is to load the image into memory the first time the sprite is needed and then use that image every time the sprite is used afterwards to cut down on disk reads. On desktops this works great, but if you have a lot of different sprites and are programming for devices with smaller memory, this can lead to some problems. Programmers may need to be a bit more creative to get some of this stuff working well on smaller devices or maybe I just fail at python/pygame programming. XD

 

[sindbad]

I've never heard of anyone finding python confusing. Have you tried the tutorial? That's all I needed. And C++ is not really simple, even parsers for it are complicated.

 

[nyrath]

There is a rather powerful framework from Trolltech called "Qt". I've done some sizable applications using PyQt, which is a set of Python bindings for the Qt framework. There are public domain versions of both, and it would be nifty if they were ported to the Pandora.

 

[sindbad]

Qt already works on hardware similar to the pandora and python is insanely popular, so they should be there.

About python memory management, the gc module has tools for that.

 

[randomhack]

That is my main gripe with Python. Because it has its own garbage collection scheme it's hard, if not impossible to do any real memory management. This isn't really a problem on desktops that are often running with 1-2gb of ram but it can be a hurdle when programming for handheld systems packing a whopping 64-128mb of memory (some of which is being monopolized by the OS).

The common practice with image based sprites in pygame is to load the image into memory the first time the sprite is needed and then use that image every time the sprite is used afterwards to cut down on disk reads. On desktops this works great, but if you have a lot of different sprites and are programming for devices with smaller memory, this can lead to some problems. Programmers may need to be a bit more creative to get some of this stuff working well on smaller devices or maybe I just fail at python/pygame programming. XD

You can ask Python to delete an object by calling __del__ method. This immediately deletes the object.