Unladen-Swallow: A faster python

[Irmen de Jong]

Tim Roberts wrote:
> Luis M. González <luismgz at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This is a new project started by two Google engineers to speed up
>> python:
>> http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/
> 
> I read this with a skeptical eye, but they have some very interesting ideas
> here.  IronPython has certainly shown that Python can be successfully
> implemented in a JIT compiled VM in a performant way, but it has issues
> running C extension modules.

My little experience with IronPython is that its raw compute speed is actually
faster on my machine than CPython (test.pystone is 50% faster in ironpython), but:
- it takes a very long time to start up (almost 5 seconds)
- I/O and networking (sockets) is slower

To compare, Jython starts in about half a second on my machine, which makes it
usable to run short scripts for instance. (Unfortunately its raw compute speed
is slower than CPython: test.pystone runs at half the speed).

I hope 'unladen swallow' won't suffer from a long startup time and has decent I/O speed!

> I'll be curious to see where this project goes.

Me too.
Although CPython has always been plenty fast for me :)

--irmen