On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 04:16:49PM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
impact on reusability of the runtime. The bytecode engine cannot be considered independent from the rest of the runtime.
If you must have a portable bytecode format, why not use the JVM? Perhaps it's not optimal, but it works reasonably well, has a few reasonably complete free implementations that are mostly strangling due to lack of manpower, has some support in GCC 3.0, and is actually deployed in browsers and on people's systems *right now*. I fail to see why we should run after some mythical Perl/Python bytecode that would have to be 1) designed 2) implemented 3) debugged 4) actually made available to users 5) actually downloaded by users. (Much the same objections apply to .NET for Unix.) There's also the cultural difference between Python's "write it clearly and then optimize it" and Perl's "let's write clever optimized code right from the start". Perhaps this can be bridged, perhaps not. --amk