a basic bytecode to machine code compiler

Terry Reedy tjreedy at udel.edu
Thu Mar 31 20:52:33 EDT 2011


On 3/31/2011 6:33 PM, Rouslan Korneychuk wrote:
> I was looking at the list of bytecode instructions that Python uses and
> I noticed how much it looked like assembly. So I figured it can't be to
> hard to convert this to actual machine code, to get at least a small
> boost in speed.
>
> And so I whipped up a proof of concept, available at
> https://github.com/Rouslan/nativecompile
>
> I'm aware that PyPy already has a working JIT compiler, but I figure it
> will be a long time before they have a version of Python that is ready
> for everybody to use, so this could be useful in the mean time.

I believe PyPy folk think it ready now, at least for some uses. 
Speedwise, it is more or less is now comparable to CPython, winning some 
benchmarks, losing others.
...
> What do people think? Would I be wasting my time going further with this?

Depends on whether your goal is personal (learning, fun, use) or 
usefulness to others. For the latter, you *might* do better to help with 
an existing project, such as Cython or Dufour's ShedSkin.

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy




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