And that is probably one of the reasons why projects like Paludis were started years ago.
The funny thing about Portage is though that Python doesn't cause any performance issues as Portage/Emerge is slow by design. So while Paludis is written in C++, it isn't much faster, as it still has to interpret all those thousands of bash-style ebuilds/exheres.
This might sound as if I wouldn't like Gentoo/Exherbo et al. but in fact, my desktop PC is running Gentoo or Exherbo for the last 10 years at least. But it was exactly that experience which made me conclude that system tools like package managers, shells, etc. should be written in statically linked languages.
The funny thing about Portage is though that Python doesn't cause any performance issues as Portage/Emerge is slow by design. So while Paludis is written in C++, it isn't much faster, as it still has to interpret all those thousands of bash-style ebuilds/exheres.
This might sound as if I wouldn't like Gentoo/Exherbo et al. but in fact, my desktop PC is running Gentoo or Exherbo for the last 10 years at least. But it was exactly that experience which made me conclude that system tools like package managers, shells, etc. should be written in statically linked languages.