[Python-Dev] Re: pirate (python+parrot)

[Dan Sugalski]

At 2:13 PM -0400 8/4/03, A.M. Kuchling wrote:
>On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 13:21:52 -0400, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.net> wrote:
>>OTOH there may be a devilish plan here to let Dan believe he won't
>>have to work very hard, and then in the end he'll lose because your
>>implementations are inefficcient... :-)
>
>For some reason the Parrot developers seem more focused on working 
>with bytecode; see Dan Sugalski's weblog at 
>http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/000205.html .  (There's an 
>amusing link in the comments for a 
>Python-bytecode-to-SAX-event-stream translator; my mind is boggled.) 
>Bytecode translation doesn't strike me as a very useful course to 
>follow, because Python's bytecode is vulnerable to being changed 
>between versions and because looking at bytecode provides less 
>information than looking at an AST.

The reason for the interest in bytecode for this goes back to the 
python-dev traffic that lead to the challenge starts at 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-January/032598.html 
more or less (there are some messages previous to it). The quick 
summary is that it was posited that native compilation and/or JITting 
(depending on how you look at it) wouldn't be a win for Python. I 
said it would be and parrot was sufficiently far along for me to be 
comfortable with that, and put up $10 and a round of beer to 
emphasize I was willing to back it up. (Seemed an appropriate way to 
show I was serious) Guido took me up on it, and the bet escalated a 
bit afterwards.

The bytecode emphasis is there mainly because of the bet. I put up 
that parrot'd be a faster engine for python than the CPython core, 
not a better parser of the python source. The best way to demonstrate 
that is to run some python bytecode--actually producing that bytecode 
is a matter for a compiler, and while that's certainly an important 
thing, it wasn't the main emphasis.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan at sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk