2012/7/18 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info>

WPython in particular seems to be very promising, and quite fast. I don't understand why it doesn't get more attention (although I admit I can't criticise, since I haven't installed or used it myself).

http://www.pycon.it/media/stuff/slides/beyond-bytecode-a-wordcode-based-python.pdf

Yes, that was the reason that brought me to stop the project: lack of interest from python community. But at the last EuroPython I had the opportunity to talk to Guido, so I think that I can try to port WPython (and check for some ideas).

However the fault with WPython was mine: it wasn't a simple patch, so it was very difficult to review. My bad.

In the Java world, there are byte-code optimizers such as Soot, BLOAT and ProGuard which apparently can speed up Java significantly. As far as I can tell, in the Python world byte-code optimization is a severely neglected area. For good reason? No idea.

--
Steven

I think that Python case is different. You can't spend so many times on optimizing the generating code, because usually the code is compiled at the execution time. Startup time is an issue for Python, which is influenced so much by the source-to-bytecode compilation.

Java is statically compiled, and then executed. So you can think about using better optimizers until the code will finally run.

Regards,

Cesare