python on the smalltalk VM

[Douglas Alan]

"Andrew Dalke" <dalke at acm.org> writes:

> http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/html/SmalltalkSolutions2001%232.html

> > Python is a big part for the execution engine, this is a new
> > area. The Smalltalk VM runs Python 10 to 100x faster.

Sounds somewhat dubious to me, but I should point out the paper
"Making Pure Object-Oriented Languages Practical" by Craig Chambers
and David Ungar.  Craig Chambers is one of the designers of the
language, Self, which is a direct successor to Smalltalk.  Self had
the aims of being of *the* most beautiful and orthogonal language
known to man.  This also made it one of the most difficult to optimize
and consequently, one of the most inefficient.  (In Self, even
integers are full-fledged objects that accept messages just like any
other object.  Integers in Self can also be used to create derived
objects that can override the usual integer methods.)  Self is a
*very* beautiful and elegant language, though sometimes one wonders if
they didn't take orthogonality just a bit too far.

After many years of research, they came up with a compiler for Self
that would generate code that runs about one half to one third the
speed of compiled C code.  This is 30 to 50 times faster than Python.
I see no reason that the same techniques couldn't be applied to speed
up Python, but it would probably be a hell of a lot of work and slow
down compile times significantly.

|>oug