[legends2k]

Why not Python? I primarily program in C++ but I see it as a decent choice as Python is available in almost all recent machines. Of course Windows is a notable exception but given it's a tool for developers I guess Python should be present.

[IshKebab]

1. Terrible performance.

2. Terrible installation UX.

The number of issues we've had with pre-commit because it's written in Python and Python tooling breaks constantly...

In fairness, the latter point may be finally solved by using `uv` and `uv tool install`. Performance is still a major issue though. Yamllint is easily the slowest linter we use.

(I'm tempted to try rewriting it in Rust with AI.)

[mcswell]

> 1. Terrible performance

Performance only matters if you're doing something compute- or disk-intensive, and then only if the libraries you're using are Python all the way down. (AI programming, at least the kind that most of us do--I don't know about places like OpenAI) is generally done with Python using libraries that use some compiled language under the hood.

And in this case--a linter--performance is almost certainly never an issue.

[IshKebab]

The only thing computers do is compute and disk.

Performance only matters if you care about performance, and I do care about performance. If you don't, fine I guess.

[mcswell]

What do you care if a program takes one second or half a second, or even 1/10 of a second?

[turtlebits]

Then remove it? There's always tradeoffs adding tooling - I'm assuming you have it in your workflow to catch downstream issues because it saves more time in the long run.

[viraptor]

It definitely is a problem when the tool you're going to use a few times a week takes an extra hundred milliseconds compared to a native solution. Especially when you need to process huge data files like hand crafted makefiles. I can totally feel your pain - extra effort would've been made to avoid that at the cost of development speed. /s

[justinrubek]

I find that writing anything substantially complex in python sacrifices the development speed. That isn't its strong suit. It's that a lot of people want to write their code in it by preference.

[IshKebab]

Yeah if only it was an extra 100 milliseconds a few times a week. We have yamllint (also written in Python) in our pre-commit (also written in Python) and it definitely adds a second or two.

Also format-on-save is a common workflow.

[smusamashah]

Terrible portability across platforms specially with dependencies.

[kiitos]

`pip install ...` is not a reliable or appropriate mechanism for distribution of any kind of tool like this one. Table stakes is pre-compiled architecture-specific binaries.