stackless python

[Christian Tismer]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> Christian Tismer <tismer at tismer.com> writes:
<snip>


> The thing I don't fully understand is that several Scheme
> implementations are both smaller and faster than Python.  I've been
> wondering for a while whether it's time to graft a Python parser onto
> a Scheme compiler/evaluator. 


I don't understand this fully, either.
For sure, Scheme has got much more manpower than Python, since
so many university projects have been supporting Scheme.
Many Scheme constructs are compiled into machine code, which
Python doesn't try yet.

And most of computation time is not spent in Python's evaluator
(which can of course be dramatically sped up as Py2C has shown),
but in the implementation of all the many objects. The Python C
library is highly optimized, but it is a library, and therefore
there are many calls for every object, which cannot be optimized
away, easily.

BTW Sam Rushing did some work towards a Scheme-based Python
a while ago.

> The limitations of "simple generators"
> also seem kind of artificial--maybe Stackless for 2.2 can support
> calling a generator from multiple places.


Sure, Stackless generators are not limited. They are first class
objects which can be used everywhere. Just think of ICON's
co-expressions.

ciao - chris

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