HOPE: A Python just-in-time compiler for astrophysical computations

[BartC]

On 21/06/2015 01:29, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> Another beasty I've just stumbled across which you may find interesting
> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213133714000687

Blimey, that's a lot of waffle in there, but I suppose that's to be 
expected from a published paper.

I think the gist of it is, that you highlight specific Python functions 
that you need to be fast (add a decorator), then it tries to translate 
those into actual C++ by inferring types. All done transparently at 
runtime (although I imagine it would be hard to hide the huge machinery 
of a C++ compiler in action).

The benchmarks seem to be individual functions which it presumably 
successfully translated fully into C++, so it is effectively comparing 
CPython to C++.

It also puts in a good dig at PyPy by including one benchmark where it 
is 6 times as slow as CPython!

It's not clear why it's particularly useful for astrophysics.

-- 
Bartc