Hi Grant, On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 17:01 -0500, Grant Olson wrote:

I'm working on a dynamic x86 assembler for python.

I noticed your pyasm announcements with interest already :- )

Someone on comp.lang.python mentioned that you guys were dynamically compiling python code via pyrex. I was under the impression that this was static compilation. Which one of us is right?

We use Pyrex to statically compile dynamically generated source code. The compiled code is then imported into the process that generated the code. But surely, this still means we are statically compiling things. However, these days the pyrex backend is more or less superceded by direct generation of C code. This is still static but allows us much more control of the generated C structures.

I tried digging around your website some, but couldn't find any info.

Yeah, our translation and annotation documentation is worse than lacking ... also because it has been changing very much all the time but we are getting to a more stable base it seems ... (crosses three fingers) so there is no good excuse for the missing documentation anymore :-)

BTW, the interpreter is in much better shape than when I last checked it out (probably 18 months ago ;-) )

Hehe, thanks. Btw, at the Pycon conference (or rather at the sprint before the conference) next week we want to push PyPy further to become a compliant Python implementation. Because we can run PyPy on top of CPython we can test compliancy independently of generating a standalone version. But we also work actively in the translation and type inference area. Carl-Friedrich Bolz has been working lately on an LLVM backend ( see http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/ ) and we definitely are looking for dynamic machine code backends for multiple platforms. Let me note that with 'dynamic' we usually mean even more dynamic than your pyasm, in that you could assemble and run inline fragments of machine code at runtime (for implementing e.g. Psyco in PyPy). cheers, holger