[Python-Dev] A wordcode-based Python

[Cesare Di Mauro]

Hi Collin

On Mon, May 11, 2009 11:14PM, Collin Winter wrote:
> Hi Cesare,
>
> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Cesare Di Mauro
> <cesare.dimauro at a-tono.com> wrote:
>> At the last PyCon3 at Italy I've presented a new Python implementation,
>> which you'll find at http://code.google.com/p/wpython/
>
> Good to see some more attention on Python performance! There's quite a
> bit going on in your changes; do you have an
> optimization-by-optimization breakdown, to give an idea about how much
> performance each optimization gives?

I planned it in the next release that will come may be next week.

I'll introduce some #DEFINEs and #IFs in the code, so that
only specific optimizations will be enabled.

> Looking over the slides, I see that you still need to implement
> functionality to make test_trace pass, for example; do you have a
> notion of how much performance it will cost to implement the rest of
> Python's semantics in these areas?

Very little. That's because there are only two tests on test_trace that
don't pass.

I think that the reason stays in the changes that I made in the loops.
With my code SETUP_LOOP and POP_BREAK are completely
removed, so the code in settrace will failt to recognize the loop and
the virtual machine crashes.

I'll fix it in the second release that I have planned.

> Also, I checked out wpython at head to run Unladen Swallow's
> benchmarks against it, but it refuses to compile with either gcc 4.0.1
> or 4.3.1 on Linux (fails in Python/ast.c). I can send you the build
> failures off-list, if you're interested.
>
> Thanks,
> Collin Winter

I'm very interested, thanks. That's because I worked only on Windows
machines, so I definitely need to test and fix it to let it run on any other
platform.

Cesare