I’m looking into writing a wxWidget that displays a graphical node network, and therefore does a lot of drawing operations. I know that using Python to do it is going to be slower, but I’d rather get it working and port it later when its functional. Ideally, if the performance hit isn’t too great, I’d prefer to keep the codebase in Python for easy updates.
What I’m wondering is how much slower should I expect things to go? I realize this is vague and open ended, but I just need a sense of what to expect. Will drawing 500 circles bog down? Will it be noticeable at all? What are your experiences?
IMHO, main bottleneck will be the data structures you are going to use for representing the network graph. I have coded a similar application for tracing dependencies between various component versions in a system and graphics was the last thing I had to worry about and I was certainly drawing more than 500 objects with gradient fills for some of them!
If you are getting bogged down, you should checkout using PyGame for drawing things.