Towards faster Python implementations - theory

[Robert Brown]

sturlamolden <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> writes:

> On May 10, 7:18 pm, "Terry Reedy" <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
>
> CMUCL and SBCL depends on the dominance of the x86 architecture.

CMUCL and SBCL run on a variety of architectures, including x86, 64-bit x86,
PowerPC, Sparc, Alpha, and Mips.  See

    http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html

for platform support information.

> Or one could translate between Python and Lisp on the fly, and use a
> compiled Lisp (CMUCL, SBCL, Franz, GCL) as runtime backend.

This has been done by Willem Broekema.  PLPython is a Python implementation
that translates Python source into Common Lisp at read time.  Under the
covers, the Lisp is compiled into machine code and then run.  See

    http://trac.common-lisp.net/clpython/

Currently, CLPython uses some non-standard Allegro Common Lisp features, so
it does not run on all the free implementations of ANSI Common Lisp.  The
implementation is interesting, in part because it shows how expensive and
complex some Python primitives are.