On-topic: alternate Python implementations

[Stefan Behnel]

Steven D'Aprano, 04.08.2012 12:54:
> Berp is based on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which is a modern, 
> efficient, optimizing compiler capable of producing excellent quality 
> machine code on Windows, Mac, Linux and many Unixes. It gives you all the 
> advantages of a high-level language with high-level data structures, type 
> inference, and a compiler capable of generating optimized, fast, machine 
> code.

Although all those optimisations don't mean that Python code would run fast
on top of it. Just because you translate Python to another language and
platform doesn't mean that there's any benefit from the underlying platform
optimisations. Both PyPy and Cython run Python code faster than CPython,
but not because they eventually translate it into machine code but because
they optimise and specialise it along the way, based on its high-level code
constructs. One big success of the Unladen Swallow project was to show that
bare JIT compilation is mostly worthless for high level languages.


> Who would want to deal with C's idiosyncrasies, low-powered explicit type 
> system, difficult syntax, and core-dumps, when you could use something 
> better?

The core developers of both CPython and Cython aim for exactly that. They
write C so you don't have to. But keep in mind that C is still *the* lingua
franca of software development. A major reason why Python is (slowly)
catching up these days is that the main implementation is written in C and
makes it easy to interface with C code.

Stefan