first release of PyPy

[Christian Tismer]

Ville Vainio wrote:

>>>>>>"Torsten" == Torsten Bronger <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
> 
> 
>     Torsten> What's supposed to be compiled?  Only PyPy itself or also
>     Torsten> the programs it's "interpreting"?
> 
> PyPy is written in python, if it can be compiled then the programs can
> be as well.

Well, this is not really true. PyPy is written in RPython,
a sub-language of Python that is implicitly defined by
"simple and static enough to be compilable".

We have not yet started to work on the dynamic nature of
Python, that needs different technology (Psyco).

>     Torsten> I've been told by so many books and on-line material that
>     Torsten> Python cannot be compiled (unless you cheat).  So how is
>     Torsten> this possible?
> 
> These guys are exploring a new territory. OTOH, Lisp is a dynamic
> language like python and it can be compiled to native code. Pyrex
> demonstrates the "trivial" way to compile python to native code, the
> real problem is making the resulting code fast. Typically this
> requires type inference (i.e. figuring out the type of an object from
> the context because there are no type declarations) to avoid dict
> lookups in method dispatch.

Type inference works fine for our implementation of Python,
but it is in fact very limited for full-blown Python programs.
Yoou cannot do much more than to try to generate effective code
for the current situation that you see. But that's most often
quite fine.

-- 
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