[pypy-dev] How to translate 300000 lines of C

[Armin Rigo]

Hello Holger,

On Tue, Jan 21, 2003 at 04:05:04PM +0100, holger krekel wrote:
> Sounds nice but i am not convinced this is doable in a simple
> way.  But simplicity should be a major goal.  It's to me what
> made and makes python a success.
> 
> (...)
>
> My implicit point here was that it's hardly possible to 
> convince CPython-dev people to prototype or implement 
> at Java-level.

I now feel that I was off-target.  Mea culpa.  Our goal is indeed not to keep 
as close as CPython as possible, but rather to suggest an alternate 
implementation that might be used as reference at some time.

Let's forget all my arguments in favour of a fully automated translation.  We 
may keep Christian's ideas of a C-to-Python helper, which we might use for 
specific parts of CPython; the resulting Python code would still be the 
reference (with maintainability acheivable using various tricks like diff'ing 
the outputs of our translator on the old and the new CPython version to know 
what we should update in our Python-only reference implementation).


Armin.