I'm surprised no one has mentioned Psyco yet -- probably because it evolved into PyPy -- but IIRC, Psycho was pretty much the same as what the OP is talking about -- direct Python to machine code, and easy on the fly or ahead of time compilation.

If I recall, the "magic" for dealing with a dynamic language was that it was a "specializing" compiler -- if you call a function with, e.g. two integers as input, it could compile a special version that only worked with two integers, and thus could be native fast. (Armin even argued that it *could* be faster than C :-) ).

Not sure if this tool is doing anything like that, but it seems there are some pretty big limits as to what can be done without either a JIT (like PyPy), or type annotations (like Cython).

-CHB

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019 at 5:37 AM David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:

It very much sounds like marketing hype to repeat this "direct to assembly" thing so much. Essentially it's claiming they are better at writing optimizers that are the more numerous authors of GCC, LLVM, etc. That's not inconceivable, but it's a hold claim requiring strong evidence.

Thanks, Antoine, for pointing me in right direction about PyPy. I knew they experimented with LLVM, but thought that avenue was more of a success. Indeed PyPy directly generates it's machine code, so maybe that approach is a good one. But PyPy also had a decade or more of effort behind it to get as good as it is (and it's open source)

On Mon, Sep 9, 2019, 4:08 AM Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
Mark @pysoniq wrote:
> Translating a single language directly to assembly gives the best
> optimizations because most of the commonly used compilers, like GCC, LLVM and
> Clang, use an intermediate language intended for many languages, and compiles
> to a number of target architectures.

To take advantage of that, you need to find some optimisations
that are made possible by the fact that you're compiling Python
in particular to x86 in particular. That's something else that
would be interesting to hear about.

--
Greg
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