stackless python

[Justin Sheehy]

Michael Hudson <mwh at python.net> writes:

>> >At least a good portion of Scheme implementations support this level
>> >of dynamism.  At least a couple of those are pretty darn efficient
>> >compared to CPython.
>
> Were any of those compiling the code?

Yes, Chez Scheme performs incremental compilation.

> It may be almost a social thing; the sort of code one writes in scheme
> may be easier to compile efficiently than the sort of code one writes
> in Python.

Could be.

My personal suspicion is that the main reasons for the fact that
Scheme implementations tend to be so much more optimized than Python
are:

1 - Hundreds of graduate students attacking the problem.

2 - Less concern with issues like maintainability and vast portability
    of a single core implementation.

I really don't believe the "Python is harder to optimize" argument[1],
either for language definition or social reasons.  Other similarly
dynamic languages have successfully produced well-optimized
implementations.  I think that it just hasn't been a very high
priority among the relatively small group of people that actually work
on the CPython core.

-Justin

[1] - qualification: There are a few things that Python doesn't have
      that do make it harder to optimize than it would be if they were
      present, such as type declarations.  My point is that other
      languages that are also missing these features have not found
      them to be insurmountable obstacles.