Tiny/small/minimalist Python?

[Paul Rubin]

Irmen de Jong <irmen.NOSPAM at xs4all.nl> writes:
> Back in the days my port of Python to the Commodore Amiga machine ran
> quite comfortably on a 50 mhz CPU with 4 Mb of RAM. (ok ok it was
> Python 1.5.2, that has to be said).

Even that sounds way too slow.  Kyoto Common Lisp started in a few
seconds on a Microvax-class machine, and an Alpha running Vax
emulation should be at least as fast as that.  Python shouldn't have
especially worse startup overhead than KCL unless it's doing something
silly.

I'd try running Python under a profiler and figure out what's slowing
it down.  I don't understand the point of developing something in Lua
on a Unix system.  Lua is a cute scripting language that's easier to
embed and sandbox than Python and is smaller, but the language itself
is not nearly as nice to code in.  I suggested Lua because I was
imagining some kind of memory-limited embedded application that needed
a lightweight extension language without too much of an OS interface,
and Lua is good for that.  Using it to write a compiler sounds
masochistic.  If there's an obstacle to using Python, I'd even
consider using KCL (or its current incarnation), which has its own
compiler (compiles Lisp to C code) among other things.  It does need
several MB of memory.