About alternatives to Matlab

[sturlamolden]

Carl Banks wrote:

> > Ok. Perhaps starting a Python JIT in something like MetaOCaml or Lisp/Scheme
> > would be a good student project?
>
> ...and finishing would be a good project for a well-funded team of
> experienced engineers.

I think this is a good idea. We could use the AST from the CPython
compiler, translate on the fly to ANSI Common Lisp, and pass it off to
SBCL (which is very fast and supports native threads). It would even
solve the issue of Python's crappy GIL and reference counting (as
opposed to a modern garbage collector).

Another option would be to use something like pyrex to compile Python
on-the-fly to C, and then compile using GCC or MSVC.

A third option would be to translate on the fly to Scheme, and compile
using Bigloo.

It would not be a JIT-compiler, but rather something like the Lisp
solution where individual functions can be compiled when speed is
important.

It sounds like a fun project to me.