what's the point of rpython?

[Paul Rubin]

alex23 <wuwei23 at gmail.com> writes:
> Here's an article by Guido talking about the last attempt to remove
> the GIL and the performance issues that arose:
> 
> "I'd welcome a set of patches into Py3k *only if* the performance for
> a single-threaded program (and for a multi-threaded but I/O-bound
> program) *does not decrease*."

The performance decrease is an artifact of CPython's rather primitive
storage management (reference counts in every object).  This is
pervasive and can't really be removed.  But a new implementation
(e.g. PyPy) can and should have a real garbage collector that doesn't
suffer from such effects.