[pypy-dev] Re: Fwd: michele.simionato at gmail.com: ACCU conference aftermath

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Michael,

On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 11:56:20AM +0100, Michael Hudson wrote:
> > I took the liberty to forward here the following e-mail from Michele 
> > Simionato, as it contains interesting links.
> 
> I think Michele is using a different definition of "JIT" to me...

Thanks to Michael and others for reminding us that -- althought my own nose is
very much stuck in the details of C code generation at the moment -- this is
not the goal of PyPy per se but just an intermediate phase before we can do
much better.  I know the last talks I gave about PyPy were about that, but
that's because that's where we are now working, and it's the first tangible
result we can demonstrate (the alternative being yet another "we-can-do-it"  
talk "supported" by prototypes 2000 times slower than CPython...).

There are lots interesting projects out there about various forms of
compilation and optimization, and PyPy looks quite similar to some of them,
particularly the "elegant" ones, which makes the analogy all the more
tempting.  But to compete with these systems we'd have to put a real lot of
efforts into generating the best possible C code.

Looking at extremely powerful static compiler, even if the "math" part in me
thinks about how nice and elegant they are, another part in me ends up feeling
like it's all wasted efforts...


A bientôt,

Armin.