I'm asking the question after reading this article
http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=95
Also isn't it a penalty to use cgi instead of fastcgi ?
Update: why some people do pretend like in answer "that you get 20-30% performance improvement" ? Is it pure guess or is this number coming from solid benchmark ? I have looked at HipHop performance is more in the scale of 10 times.
I've done webdev in a few languages and frameworks, including python, php, and perl. I host them myself and my biggest sites get around 20k hits a day.
Any language and framework that has reasonable speed can be scaled up to take 20k hits a day just by throwing resources at it. Some take more resources than others. (Plone, Joomla. I'm looking at you).
My Witty sites (none in production yet) take a lot more (from memory around 5000% more) pounding (using seige) than for example my python sites. Ie. When I hit them as hard as I can with seige, the witty sites serve a lot more pages per second.
I know it's not a true general test though.
Other speed advantages that witty gives you:
Multi threading
If you deploy with the built in websrever (behind ha-proxy for example) and have your app be multi-threaded .. it'll load a lot less memory than say a perl or php app.
Generally with php and perl apps, you'll have Apache fire up a process for each incoming connection, and each process loads the whole php interpreter, all the code and variables and objects and what not. With heavy frameworks like Joomla and Wordpress (depending on the number of plugins), each process can get pretyy humungous on memory consumption.
With the Wt app, each session loads a WApplication instance (a C++ object) and it's whole tree of widgets and stuff. But the memory the code uses stays the same, no matter how many connections.
The inbuilt Web2.0 ness
Generally with traditional apps, they're still built around the old 'http request comes in' .. 'we serve a page' .. 'done' style of things. I know they are adding more and more AJAXy kind of thigns all the time.
With Wt, it defaults to using WebSockets where possible, to only update the part of the page that needs updating. It falls back to standard AJAX, then if that's not supported http requests. With the AJAX and WebSockets enabled clients, the same WApplication C++ object is continually used .. so no speed is lost in setting up a new session and all that.
In response to the 'C++ is too hard for webdev'
C++ does have a bit of a learning curve. In the mid nineties we did websites in Java j2ee. That was considered commercially viable back then, and was a super duper pain to develop in, but it did have a good advantage of encouraging good documentation and coding practices.
With scripting websites, it's easy to take shortcuts and not realize they're there. For example one 8 year old perl site I worked on had some code duplicated and nobody noticed. Each time it showed a list of products, it was running the same SQL query twice.
With a C++ site, I think it'd have less chance because, in the perl site, there wasn't that much programming structure (like functions), it was just perl and embedded html. In C++ you'd likely have methods with names and end up with a name clash.
Types
One time, there was a method that took an int identifier, later on we changed it to a uuid string. The Python code was great, we didn't think we needed to change it; it ran fine. However there was little line buried deep down that had a different effect when you passed it a string. Very hard to track down bug, corrupted the database. (Luckily only on dev and test machines).
C++ would have certainly complained a lot, and forced us to re-write the functions involved and not be lazy buggers.
With C++ and Java, the compiler errors and warns a lot of those sorts of mistakes for you.
I find unit testing is generally not as completely necessary with C++ apps (don't shoot me), compared to scripting language apps. This is due to the language enforcing a lot of stuff that you'd normally put in a unit test for say a python app.
Summary
From my experience so far .. Wt does take longer to develop stuff in than existing frameworks .. mainly because the existing frameworks have a lot more out of the box stuff there. However it is easier to make extremely customized apps in Wt than say Wordpress imho.
From people I've spoken with who've moved from PHP to Wt (a C++ web framework) reported significant improvements. From the small applications I've created using Wt to learn it, I've seen it run faster than the same PHP type applications I created. Take the information for what you will, but I'm sold.
This reminds me how 20-30 years ago people were putting Assembly vs C, and then 10-20 years ago C vs C++. Of course C++ will be faster than PHP/Rails but it'll take 5x more effort to build maintainable and scalable application.
The point is that you get 20-30% performance improvement while sacrificing your development resources. Would you rather have you app work 30% faster or have 1/2 of the features implemented?
Most web applications are network-bound instead of processor-bound. Writing your application in C++ instead of a higher-level language doesn't make much sense unless you're doing really heavy computation. Also, writing correct C++ programs is difficult. It will take longer to write the application and it is more likely that the program will fail in spectacular ways due to misused pointers, memory errors, undefined behavior, etc. In general, I would say it is not worth it.
Whenever you eliminate a layer of interpretive or OS abstraction, you are bound to get some performance gain. That being said, the language or technology itself does not automatically mean all your problems are solved. I've fixed C++ code that took many hours to process a relatively simple set of records. The problem was in the implementation, and the fix was not related to the language's features or limitations.
Assuming things are all implemented correctly, you're sure to get better performance. The problem will be in finding the bugs. One of the problems with C++ is that many developers are currently "trained" or accustomed to having a lot of details related to memory management behind objects. This eliminates the need to consider things like, "What can happen if I pass this pointer around to several threads?" Sometimes it works well, but not always. You still have some subtleties of the language that you need to consider regardless of how the objects hide the nasty details.
In my experience, you'll need several seasoned C++ developers watching over the code to be able to keep the bugs and memory leaks from getting out of hand.
I'm certainly not sold on this. If you want a performance gain over PHP why not use a Java (or better yet Scala) framework? These are much better for web development, have nice, relatively easy to use frameworks and avoid a lot of the headaches of C++. I've always seen one of the main pluses of web-development (and most modern non-scientific/high performance applications) as being able to avoid the headaches that come along with C/C++ development.
Related
I have been searching the web for this information and I think I need some help with understanding this better.
I would like to learn how to write back-end of a web application in C++ and essentially how to output C++ to web pages and make it talk to a MySQL database. For the record I can write decent code in C++ but I never did it for web.
Wherever I go on the web and find people asking about this the first list of responses is WHY would you when yo have scripting languages. I am aware of the scripting languages, I have used them for years but I am running across cases where this is a requirement and I would like to learn more about it.
My intent it to write an app that uses Angularjs on the front and C++ on the back. I am a fairly well versed PHP developer and I might take this task on by writing PHP initially but I do need to account for a possibility of rewriting in C++ and this makes me think I should probably write it in C++ from the get go.
I understand that the most usual question is WHY I would use C++ instead of a scripting language so I will try and give a limited set of reasons. Please do understand I am not a pro in this aspect of C++ yet and I am evaluating the situation I am in.
So here are some of my reasons...
The project I am about to take on is bound to be very resource intensive and I would really like to gain all the speed I can possibly get from the get go. The more control I have over the app process the better. Essentially I need precision, I know and love C++ and it allows me to retain the control to a great degree..
The group of people I am talking to in the context of the project are aware of the advantages of C++ fro the resources and speed perspective and they hold a portion of the investment bag which gives them a vote in how the project will be approached. Time IS on my side, but i want to waste as little of it as possible.
I am comfortable with C++, have a C++ oriented mind and would love to use it in this context as much as possible.
So I guess my questions are...
Is there a good tutorial that can take me from the basics to
something intermediate?
How do I write a web site backend in C++?
How do I write C++ to work with MySQL on Linux.
Is there a way to do this on Linux servers?
(I believe Facebook it doing it).
I found this http://www.compileonline.com/compile_cpp_online.php on http://www.compileonline.com and it is giving me hope but I need more information to know how to get there.
I am aware that I am not asking an example code based question but I often find good reference posts on Stack that answer these types of questions so I hope someone can help me. I feel a bit lost here.
My preferred approach to building angular apps is to use the back-end pretty much strictly as a REST server.
Here are a few places that list options:
I'm searching a cgi lib in C to build a restful web service
and
How popular is C++ for making websites/web applications?
and
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/147445/how-does-one-interface-c-with-the-web-at-google-for-example
One option that seems to come up multiple times is http://cppcms.com/. Also http://www.webtoolkit.eu
Integrating angular will be pretty much the same as integrating with any other back-end. If you're using the back-end as a REST server you can pretty much statically serve all of the angular code.
I know how to program in Python but I am also interested in learning C++. I have heard that it is much faster than python and for the programs I am writing currently, I would prefer them to run as quickly and efficiently as possible. I know that a lot of that comes from just writing good code but I was also wondering if using another language, such as C++, would help.
While I was pondering this, I realized that since most of my programs will be mainly using the internet (as in implementing Google APIs and using the information from them to submit data to other websites) then maybe the speed of the language doesn't matter if the speed of my internet connection is always going to be relatively the same. I have two ways I am connecting to the internet: Selenium (or some kind of automated browser) for things that require a browser, and just HTTP requests.
How much difference would I see between python and a different language even though the major focus of my programs is on the internet?
Thanks.
Scenarios
The main benefit you would get from using language that is compiled to machine code is that you can do lots of byte and bit-magic. Lets say, modifying image data, transforming audio, analysing indices of a genomic sequence database.
Typical tasks
Serving web-pages you typically have problems if a completely different sort: You will be loading a resource from hard disk, serve them directly if its an image or audio, or you will be executing different transformation steps on a text resource until it becomes the final HTML document. The latter will be using template engines, database queries, and so on.
If you look at that you can see that most of the things, say 90-99% are pretty high-level stuff -- in Python you will use an API that is optimized by many, many users for optimal performance (meaning: time and space). "Open a file" will be almost as fast in C as it is in Python, so is reading from it and serving it to some Socket. Transforming text data could be a bit faster in C++ then it is in Python, but... how fast does it have to be? A use is very likely willing to wait 200ms, isnt't he? And that is a lot of time for a nice high-level template engine to transform a bit of text.
What C++ and Python can do for you
A typical Python web-service is much faster to write and a easier to deploy then a server written in C++. If you would do it in C++ you firstly need to handle sockets and connections -- and for those would either use an existing library or write your own handling. If you use an existing library (which I strongly recommend) you are basically not doing anything differently then Python does. If you write your own handling, you have many, many low-level things you can do wrong that will burn the performance you wish for. No, that is not an option.
If you need speed, and Python and the server and template framework is not enough you should re-think your architectural approach. Then take a look at the c10k-problem and write tiny pieces in C. (Look at this c10k very hot topic, too) But I can not see many reasons not to use a high-level language like Python, if you are only looking for performance in a medium-complex web-serving application.
Summary: The difference
If you are just serving files from the hard-drive I guess your Python program would even be faster then your hand-crafted C++-server. If you use a framework written in C or C++ and just drop in your static pages, I guess you get a boost like 2-5fold against Python. Then again, if your web-application is a bit more complex then serving static content, I estimate that the difference will diminish very quickly and you will get 1-2fold speed gain at most.
It's not all about speed...
One note about another difference between C++ and Python one should not forget: Since C++ is really compiled and not as dynamic as Python you would gain a lot of static error analysis by using Python. Writing correct code is always difficult, but can be done in C++ and Python with good tests and static analysis -- the latter is simpler in C++ (my opinion). If that is an issue for you, you may think again, but you asked about speed.
For once, I have come across a lot of stuff about the use of C++ being not advisable for SSS and recommending the use of so called interpreted languages like PERL and PHP for the same. But I need the advanced OO features and flexibility of C++ to ensure a scalable and more manageable code.
I have tried many internet articles and searches and none where helpful to the point that I still have no idea if it is possible to write SS-Scripts in C++ and if yes, then how.
I have thought of couple ideas, including writing a web-server in C++ and responding accordingly after parsing the HTTP request. But it would be re-inventing the wheel and I'll end up deviating from my main project and dedicating a lot of work to ensure a functional-cum-secure HTTP server.
I have also considered PHP extensions but again the approach also comes with its own baggage and overhead.
My questions are:
Is it possible to program SSS in C++?
If yes, then what are the approaches at my disposal.
Thanks!
Ignoring, for the moment, the advisability of using C++ for SSS, your first choice would probably be Wt. Contrary to the implications in some of the other answers, no development time is not likely to increase by 10x (or anywhere close to it). No, you're not missing all the nice infrastructure features you'd expect in things like PHP, Perl or Python either.
In fact, my own experience is rather the opposite: while PHP (for example) makes it pretty easy to get a web site up and running fairly quickly, producing a web site that's really stable, secure, and responsive is a whole different story. With Wt, rather the opposite seems to be the case (at least in my, admittedly limited, experience). Getting the initial site up and running will probably take a little longer -- but about as soon as it looks, acts, and feels the way you want, it's likely to need only rather minor tweaks to be ready for public use.
Getting back to the advisability question: developing in C++ may be a bit more complex than in some languages that are more common in the SSS market -- but it's still a piece of cake compared to doing security well. If somebody has even the slightest difficulty writing C++ (e.g., tracking and freeing memory when it's no longer needed), I definitely don't want them getting close to the code for my web site.
I wouldn't recommend it, but you can certainly write CGI scripts in C++ (or in C, or in FORTRAN). But why bother? Languages like PHP do a much better job more easily, and they seem to scale well for some pretty major sites.
CGI is the "standard" way to have C or C++ code handling web requests, but you might also look into writing a module that gets linked into the web server at runtime. Google for "apache module API" (if using Apache) or "IIS module" (if using IIS).
Can you afford 10x as much development time? All the infrastructure-ish bits that you take for granted in php, perl, python are non existent or much harder to use in C++.
I see only two valid reasons to do this:
1. You only have C++ on your platform.
2. The server really has very high performance needs that would benefit from problem specific optimizations.
You can write a CGI application in C++ using an appropriate framework (like this one). But I'd recommend just going with perl or php. It will save you much time. Those tools are just better suited for this kind of job.
EDIT: corrected the link
I couldn't understand your exact requirements (license, etc) but this might be what you are looking for http://cppcms.sourceforge.net.
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Possible Duplicate:
Which sector of software industry uses C++?
C++ was for many years the holy grail of mission critical high performance development. However, it seems that for the past 10 years like much of the development world has moved to Java and C#. My quesiton is this, is C++ effectively relegated to embedded systems, OS, Browser and other special purpose development? Should I let this skillset go the way of the VB 6 and other skillsets that are no longer showing the same level of demand and value in the market? I love C++ and would love to update my knowledge in it, but I wouldn't even know where to begin to try to apply it to common business problems today.
Regards.
First of all, I doubt anybody can give a definitive answer -- there's just no way to tell exactly how much any particular language is really used. Nearly anything you can measure is a secondary measurement, such as how many people are advertising jobs using that language. The problem is that this tends to show relatively new languages as dominating to a much greater degree than is real.
That said, my belief is as follows. At one time, C++ was the hot new language on the block, and there was a bubble when it dominated the market. That bubble deflated quite a while ago. Since then, use of C++ has been growing on an absolute basis, but the market has been growing (quite a bit) faster so its shrinking on a relative basis.
There are a couple of reasons this doesn't show up in most secondary measures such as job advertisements though. A couple of the obvious ones include:
Many teams producing C++ have now had years to "settle in", so the turnover rate is relatively low.
It's now well established where it's used, so positions tend to be filled by internal promotions.
There's another effect I almost hesitate to mention, but it's true no matter how little a lot of people like it: there are both programmers and managers who are more excited about "new" than effective. This leads to a large group of wannabes who are constantly on the move to the latest and greatest "technology" (whether that happens to be a language, framework, platform, or whatever). They get a job, loaf (or worse, actually write some code), then move on to their next victim...er...employer. They cause a lot of "churn", and inflate the number of job advertisements, but produce little or nothing of any real value. That group moved from C++ to Java a long time ago, and have long since moved from Java to C# to Ruby on Rails to Hadoop to whatever the managers are excited about this week.
Lest I sound excessively negative, I should add that along the way, a few of them really find something they're good at, and (mostly) tend to stay with that. Unfortunately, for every one who does, there are at least five more new graduates to join the throng...
"C++ effectively relegated to embedded systems, OS, Browser"
"other special purpose development"
You mean 99% of the code people run on a daily basis?
C++ is still heavily used in many mission critical financial applications. For example, most of Bloomberg's platforms are based on C++ with very little front end in other languages. Many investment banks and hedge funds use algorithmic trading systems written completely in C++ (e.g., Tower Research Capital, Knight Capital, etc.).
If you've been out of C++ for a while, you may need to get used to a whole bunch of now-standard libraries. When I was doing most of my C++, STL was fairly new and you either adopted the Microsoft libs or did not. If I went back to C++ now, I'll have to learn all the new libraries to be effective.
I think most of the movement to other languages is related to web development and web-centric development. The main exception to that would be Google, which still primarily use C++ and Python.
C++ is still valuable for many high performance apps. There are other technologies, and depends on the situation different languages are better suited for your needs. But if you want strong performance, good control of what your code is doing, and flexible networking and programming stack, C++ is still a good choice.
A better suggestion is: let the problems come to you and find the language that best suites the situation, rather than take a language and go look for problems.
Still: if you know C++ well, you can learn/program in anything.
To this day, C++ is the only language which is both object oriented and compiled (or at least, which has a mature ecosystem of optimizing compilers). Which leaves it as the sole choice for most large scale, compute-intense projects.
To me the prominent example is games and game engines - these are huuuuuge projects that squeeze machines for milisecond-fractions. MS is trying to get some traction for XNA (a managed game-dev framework - basically a DirectX wrapper ), but most probably would never get any for AAA game productions.
If I take a look at the applications I have installed on the laptop I am writing this message on, I see a lot of C/C++ and few (if any) managed apps. Examples? Google Chrome, Firefox, iTunes, uTorrent, Spotify, Picasa, Google Earth, OpenOffice, Notepad++, IrfanView... this list goes on and on. I write desktop applications for a living, which are installed on thousands of PCs worldwide, and C++ is still my language of choice. The lack of dependencies (WTL is your friend) is a massive plus IMHO (and that of my customers I should add!.) YMMV though - as a seasoned developer I think I am productive enough in C++, but I can't speak for everybody.
It hasn't gone away if you need to do something really, really fast. If "fast enough" is OK, then C# and Java are fine, but if you have a calculation that takes hours or days, or you need something to happen on the microsecond timescale (i.e. high frequency trading) C++ is still the language to use.
More often than not, we get lost in the hype cycle. First there was Java, then came PHP, and currently is Python. But the fact of the matter is development of general purpose desktop application still requires use of libraries like Carbon/Cocoa for mac, GTK/QT for Linux, MFC for Windows. All of which are C/C++ based. So are most applications written for these platforms. So calling C++ as being relegated to embedded is not right, although yeah its being extensively used now, unlike earlier when it was just assembly or C at the max. In my opinion, if you want a high performance application with great looking GUI, it still has to be done in C/C++.
Different languages are prevalent in different domains. It is interesting that you think it might be rendered unimportant by being relegated to embedded systems when in fact that is where most software development occurs; at least in terms of number of projects/products.
There are many ways of measuring, and a number of them are presented here: http://langpop.com/. The evidence suggests that C++ remains important.
I'm not sure whether the gaming industry falls under "general purpose development", but if you want to develop anything that you intend to get working on more than a single console, C++ is what's for lunch. While many gaming and 3D libraries have extensions for other languages, they -all- have extensions for C/C++.
C++ is still used everywhere you want the best performance. Its major advantage is that you can use literally for everything. In addition to what other people have said you can also use it to power websites, for instance OkCupid uses it almost exclusively.
As the recent Hip Hop of Facebook shows, in the end, if you can afford it (ie. you have a large and competent team) you can always gains something using it. Then it also a matter of scale, other than industry.
C++ is still very popular. For instance, combined with Qt it is often used.
C++ is usually used for systems work, generally defined as software where the UI is not central, not application work -- where the UI is central. So, for general business use it's probably not very interesting and those problems are better solved with a higher level language. However, there will always be low level systems work to be done, and C or C++ is the practical answer for those problems right now.
As a general development language? Well, it depends on your industry, but I've worked in two different industries and there is always plenty of C++ work:
Telecoms
Embedded devices often use C and C++ for core services
Network equipment, often very complex, heavily utilize C++
Software apps that work with hardware will often be written in C++
Financial Services
Trade Execution systems are often in C++. You cannot have your garbage collection kick in when you're executing an order for a customer.
Algorithmic and high-frequency trading systems are usually in C++
General trading systems that do not have strict speed requirements seem to be in C++ and Java, with C# starting to show up as well.
Administrative applications tends to be written in Java, VB, or C# these days
Recently there is a trend towards functional languages for quantitative analysis, so F# and Haskell are starting to appear, and SAS and Matlab are always common too
I read somewhere that Nyse/Euronext uses Java, but that they disable the garbage collector and run on servers with insane amounts of memory.
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I'm thinking of trying to make some simple 2d games, but I've yet to choose a language. A lot of people recommend either C++ with SDL or python with pygame. I keep hearing that developement on C++ is fairly slow, and developement time with Python is fairly fast.
Anyways, could anyone elaborate on this? What exactly makes development in C++ so time consuming? The programs I've made have been Project Euler-style in that they're very short and math-based, so I have no experience in larger projects.
There are two things that are relevant between C++ and Python that will affect your time-to-develop any project including a game. There are the languages themselves and the libraries. I've played with the SDL to some extent and peeked at PyGame and for your specific instance I don't think the libraries are going to be much of a factor. So I'll focus on the languages themselves.
Python is a dynamically-typed, garbage-collected language. C++ is a statically-typed, non-garbage-collected language. What this means is that in C++ a lot of your development time will be spent managing memory and dealing with your type structure. This affords you a lot of power, but the question is do you really need it?
If you're looking to write a simple game with some basic graphics and some good gameplay, then I don't think you truly need all the power that C++ will give you. If you're looking to write something that will push the envelope, be the next A-list game, be the next MMO, fit on a console or a handheld device, then you will likely need the power that C++ affords.
The power of Python is in it's ability to allow you to focus more on the problem than having to deal with testing low-level issues such as memory allocation. I can't count how many times days of development have been wasted tracking down memory leaks in C or C++. An advantage of all high level languages.
Python is very easy to learn compared to C++,so you can be up to speed a lot quicker in doing basic programming tasks. Therefore, you'll move quicker into advanced tasks as well.
C++ has a lot of power but has many ways to shoot yourself in the foot compared to Python(not saying that can't be done in Python).
The compile/debug cycle can get old sometimes in C++ depending on what you're trying to do. Although technically speaking, everytime you run a Python script it's getting "compiled" per se, it's just a quicker cycle. A good IDE can help alleviate this is in Python by automatically checking your code for syntax errors while you type it out.
If you have some code you want to test inside a larger project, it's a hassle sometimes to isolate it for testing. Whereas a good Python interpreter such as IPython, makes it easy to test a small bit of code and see how the language behaves and paste it into a file.
Python also interfaces very well with existing C/C++ code through many numerous ways. That way if a new whizbang Python module you created is really slow, then you can soup it up in C/C++ then wrap it up with Python through ctypes, Boost::Python, or SWIG.
And most of all, Python comes with a great standard library that has a lot of stuff figured out for you. It's just a matter of putting the pieces altogether! It has a great community behind it, so if it's not in the standard library, there's a good chance someone out there has solved the problem (PyGame, Numpy, SciPy, Pyserial, PyWin, etc.) for you. You can just google it, grab it and plop the code right into your program...away you go!
I've heard these complaints before about C++, but the fact is, programming in any language with which you are unfamiliar is time consuming.
A good C++ programmer can probably crank out the app much faster than an okay Python programmer and visa versa.
I think C++ often gets a bad reputation because it allows you get much lower level - pointers, memory management, etc, and if you aren't used to thinking about such things, it can take a bit of time. If you are used to working in that environment, it can become second nature.
Unless choice of language is something imposed upon you by your company, team, client, etc. I usually recommend that folks go with the language they are most comfortable with OR most interested in learning more about. If speed is the issue you are concerned with, look at the learning curve for each language and your past experience. C++ tends to have a higher learning curve, but that too depends on the person.
Kindof a non-answer I know.
Python has some big advantages over programming languages like C++. I myself have programmed a lot with C++, C and other programming languages. Lately I am also programming in Python and I got to like it very much!
You can have a quick start with Python. Since it is rather simple to learn (at least with some programming experience and enough abstract thinking), you can have fast successes. Also the script-like behaviour makes starting easy and it is also possible, to quickly test some things in the integrated shell. This can also be good for debugging.
The whole language is packed with powerful features and it has a good and rather complete set of libraries.
There was the argument that with the "right library" you can develop as quickly with C++ as with Python. This might (partly) be, but I myself have never experienced it, because such libraries are rare. I had also a big library at hand, but still lacked many valuable features in C++. The so called "standard template library" STL makes things even worse in my opinion. It is a really powerful library. But it is also that complex, that it adds the complexity of an additional programming language to C++. I really disliked it and in a company I worked in, much worktime was lost, because the compiler was not able to give useful error-output in case of errors in the STL.
Python is different. Instead of putting the "speed of the programm" on the throne -- sacrificing all else (as C++ and especially the STL does) -- it puts "speed of development" first. The language gives you a powerful toolkit and it is accompanied by a huge library. When you need speed, you can also implement time critical things in C or C++ and call it from Python.
There is also at least one big online Game implemented in Python.
It's time consuming because in C++ you have to deal with more low-level tasks.
In Python you are free to focus on the development of the actual game instead of dealing with memory management etc.
there are many things that make c++ longer to develop in. Its lower level, has pointers, different libraries for different systems, the type system, and there are others I am sure I am missing.
It takes about the same amount of time to write the same code in pretty much all of the high level languages. The win is that in certain languages it is easier to use other peoples code. In a lot of Python/Ruby/Perl apps, you write 10% of the code and import libraries to do the other 90%. That is harder in C/C++ since the libraries have different interfaces and other incompatibilities.
C++ vs Python is a pretty personal choice. Personally I feel I lose more time with not having the C/Java class system (more run time errors/debugging time, don't have anywhere near as good auto completion, need to do more documentation and optimization) than I gain (not having to write interfaces/stub function and being able to worry less about memory managment). Other people feel the exact opposite.
In the end it probably depends on the type of game. If your processor intensive go to C++ (maybe with a scripting language if it makes sense). Otherwise use whatever language you prefer
I'd focus more on choosing a framework to build your game on than trying to pick a language. Unless the goal is to learn how games work inside and out, you're going to want to use a framework. Try out a couple, and pick the one that meets your requirements and feels nice to you.
Once you've picked the framework, the language choice becomes easy - use the language for which the framework is written.
There are many options for game frameworks in C++ - pygame works for python. There are many that work with other languages/tools as well (including .NET, Lua, etc.)
Short Answer
Yes python is faster in terms of development time. There are many case studies in real life that show this. However, you don't want to do a 3d graphics engine in Python.
Do you have any programming experience at all? If not, I would start with Python which is easier to learn, even if it is not a better tool for game development. If you decide you want to program games for living, you'll probably need to switch to C++ at some point.
Note that SDL is currently slow, because it basically doesn't use hardware acceleration.
SFML is an alternative of choice, and is available in Python too.
Why limit yourself to those two options? With C# or Java you get access to a huge collection of useful libraries plus garbage collection and (in the case of C#) JIT compiling.
Furthermore, you're saying that you're looking to do game development, but from your task description it sounds like you're also looking at coding your own engine. Is that part of the exercise? Otherwise you should definitely take a look at the available Indie engines out there - lots are cheap of not free and open source.
Needless to say, working from an existing engine is definitely faster than going from scratch :)
Some people would argue that development time is slower in C++ when compared to Python.
Wouldn't it be the case that the time you saved in developing an application (or game) in python is the time you gonna use in improving performance after its developed? and in the later part when you have least options left?
It largely depends upon the purpose for which you are going to develop the application.
If you are thinking for an enterprise application in which case it is going to be hit by millions (web-app) or an application with focus on low-footprint, faster loading into memory, faster execution, then your choice is C++.
If you are projecting your application for not being use at this level, surely Python is the choice to go for.
Maintainability is considerable, but disciplined code can overcome this.
Largely depends upon long term projections. On how serious and critical the application is going to be.