[pypy-dev] Re: [ann] Minimal Python project

RIGO Armin arigo at tunes.org
Fri Jan 17 13:59:20 CET 2003


Hello Paul,

On Thu, Jan 16, 2003 at 06:41:14PM -0000, Paul Rubin wrote:
> I'd think the object representation is pretty fundamental, so once you
> choose something, it will take a lot of rework to change it.

Only if you code directly in C.  By keeping at the high level all the time and using tools to emit the low-level stuff, you can experiment with zillons of variants.  Surely, among the things I'd like to try are various forms of boxing, the double-pointers representation (Christian, in GCC you can return a struct from a function and if its size is only two pointers then the function will just return them in two registers), all with or without reference counting.  We might also try emitting code for another statically typed language which already has a good GC and some boxing, like OCaml.  We could even target Java too, reusing the nice work on Jython but emitting our own interpreter core -- which could make it much easier to keep Jython in sync with CPython.

I'm not trying to impress people, all these are things that can clearly be done with reasonably little work.


A bientot,

Armin.


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