pros and cons of C++ vs Python - opinions please

[Tim-Philipp Müller]

On Wed, 2012-07-18 at 10:33 -0400, Chuck Crisler wrote:

> I will soon be developing a gstreamer replacement for a VLC
> application. I have been a C++ programmer for over 20 years, working
> with gstreamer for the last 2. I could almost build the code (OK, I
> would have to research the plugins) in my sleep. But there is this new
> thing (not really, but somewhat) called Python that works with
> gstreamer. The application that I will develop is stand-alone in the
> sense that it is invoked from a different application. What are the
> relative merits of using Python vs. C++? Currently, no one in our shop
> does Python so this would be the first app. I can't say if it would
> ever be the only app. Thank you for different opinions.

It depends a bit on the C++ "flavour" you're after as well.

If you are happy to just use the GStreamer C API and build your
application in C++, that would be my recommendation.

Otherwise there are GStreamer-Qt and GStreamermm (Gtk) C++ bindings for
GStreamer, but the problem with these is that there is not a huge user
base for them and that there are no major applications (yet) that use
them, so they've had considerably less exposure in real-world
applications than, say, the python-gst bindings.

If you don't have other reasons to switch to python, I wouldn't do it
just for this (but if you do, you should be aware of the upcoming
gst-0.10/python-gst to gst-0.11/1.0/py-gi transition).

Cheers
 -Tim