unladen swallow: python and llvm

[Stefan Behnel]

bearophileHUGS at lycos.com wrote:
> Kay Schluehr:
>> Don't understand your Cython compliant. The only tricky part of Cython
>> is the doublethink regarding Python types and C types. I attempted once
>> to write a ShedSkin like code transformer from Python to Cython based on
>> type recordings but never found the time for this because I have to work
>> on EasyExtend on all fronts at the same time.
> 
> I have tried to create a certain data structure with a recent version
> of Pyrex on Windows, and I have wasted lot of time looking for missing
> reference count updates that didn't happen, or memory that didn't get
> freed.

I wonder what you did then. Apparently, you didn't just compile a Python
program, but tried to use Pyrex/Cython to avoid writing C code. That can
work, but depends on your C expertise.

If you only compile Python code, you will not get in touch with any
ref-counting or memory leaks (any more than in CPython, that is). You only
have to care about freeing memory if you manually allocate that memory
through malloc(), in which case it's your own fault if it doesn't get freed.


> I'm sure lot of people like Cython, but I prefer a more transparent
> language, that doesn't hide me how it works inside.

Cython doesn't hide anything. Most of the magic that happens is done in
code tree transformations, which you can look up in the compiler code. The
code generation is mostly just mapping the final code tree to C code, with
some type specialisations. Cython will even copy your complete source code
line-by-line into the C code it writes, so that you can easily read up what
your code gets translated to.

I admit that the generated C code is not always simple and obvious, as it
contains lots of runtime type specialisations and optimisations. But that's
the price you pay for fast code. And you can make Cython leave out most of
the duplicated code (i.e. the pessimistic fallbacks) by adding type hints
to your code.

Stefan