Pythoniac: Thoughts on a hardware Python processor

[Steve Holden]

"Christopher Saunter" <Christopher.Saunter at durham.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:afc52t$2pj$1 at sirius.dur.ac.uk...
> Dear All,
>
> I have seen the occasional post about creating a specific hardware 'Python
> Processor', that could then be built and used in programmable logic or the
> like (Valves, relays, core memory - Pythoniac ;-) - in other words, create
> a processor that executes Python bytecode directly.  There would be
> various different reasons for doing this (the 'neat' factor etc...)
>
[... Pythoniacity ...]
>
> So, Pythoniac: a hardware (well, FPGA(2)...) processor that directly
> executes Python bytecode.  What do people think about the idea?  Is it
> really feasible?  I have doubts it would be particularly quick (in the
> same way I have my doubts about anti-gravity generators... ;-), but it
> should be fun!
>
You will, of course, have to stop the development team from tinkering with
the bytecode when moving from one major version to another. If you are
prepared to overlook their tendency to do that I would think this would be a
great project. Once you got the hardware core working the major problem
would be C/C++ to P+ compiler.

regards
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Steve Holden                                 http://www.holdenweb.com/
Python Web Programming                http://pydish.holdenweb.com/pwp/
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