Compiling

[Rocco Moretti]

Simon Faulkner wrote:
> Pardon me if this has been done to death but I can't find a simple 
> explanation.
> 
> I love Python for it's ease and speed of development especially for the 
> "Programming Challenged" like me but why hasn't someone written a 
> compiler for Python?
> 
> I guess it's not that simple eh?

The "simple" explanation for the lack of a Python compiler is the 
massive dynamisism (sp) in Python - since you can change practically 
everything at any time, in order to compile a generic python program, 
you have to effectively include the entire interpreter.  It's been done 
before (Python2C was the name, I think), but there wasn't much of a 
speed-up vs. CPython, and it hasn't been updated to work with recent 
versions of Python.

Recently there has been work on JIT type dynamic compilation techniques, 
and static compilation of a reduced Python subset. If you want to know 
more, look up the PyPy project. http://www.codespeak.net/pypy