[Cython] PyCon-DE wrap-up by Kay Hayen

[Stefan Behnel]

Hi,

Kay Hayen wrote a blog post about his view of the first PyCon-DE, including 
a bit on the discussions I had with him about Nuitka.

http://www.nuitka.net/blog/2011/10/pycon-de-2011-my-report/

It was interesting to see that Nuitka actually comes from the other side, 
meaning that it tries to be a pure Python compiler, but should at some 
point start to support (Python) type hints for the compiler. Cython made 
static types a language feature from the very beginning and is now fixing 
up the Python compatibility. So both systems will eventually become rather 
similar in what they achieve, with Cython being essentially a superset of 
the feature set of Nuitka due to its additional focus on talking to 
external libraries efficiently and supporting things like parallel loops or 
the PEP-3118 buffer interface.

One of the impressions I took out of the technical discussions with Kay is 
that there isn't really a good reason why Cython should refuse to duplicate 
some of the inner mechanics of CPython for optimisation purposes. Nuitka 
appears to be somewhat more aggressive here, partly because Kay doesn't 
currently care all that much about portability (e.g. to Python 3).

I was previously very opposed to that (you may remember my opposition to 
the list.pop() optimisation), but now I think that we have to fix up the 
generated code for each new major CPython release anyway, so it won't make 
a difference if we have to rework some more of the code because a bit of 
those inner workings changed. They sure won't change for released CPython 
versions anymore, and many implementation details are unlikely enough to 
change for years to come. It's good to continue to be considerate about 
such changes, but some of them may well bring another serious bit of 
performance without introducing real portability risks. Changes like the 
Unicode string restructuring in PEP-393 show that even relying on official 
and long standing parts of the C-API isn't enough to guarantee that code 
still works as expected in new releases, so we may just as well start 
digging deeper.

Stefan