Python's Performance

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Mike Meyer wrote:
> Donn Cave <donn at u.washington.edu> writes:
> 
>>I agree that there are many shades of grey here, but there's also a
>>real black that's sharply distinct and easy to find -- real native
>>code binaries are not interpreted.
> 
> 
> Except when they are. Many machines are microcoded, which means your
> "real native code binary" is interpreted by a microcode program stored
> in the control store. Most machines don't have a writeable control
> store (WCS), so you generally can't change the interpreter, but that's
> not always true. In the simple case, a WCS lets the vendor fix
> "hardware" bugs by providing a new version of the microcode. In the
> extreme cases, you get OS's in which the control store is part of the
> process state, so different processes can have radically different
> formats for their "native code binaries".
> 
> Then there's the Nanodata QM-1, whose microcode was interpreted by
> "nanocode".

Or the transmeta processor, that emulated x86 ops.
Diez