lisp scheme lush python etc.

[Alexander Schmolck]

Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> writes:

> I would doubt there would be much if any speed improvement in writing a
> Lisp interpreter for Python.  The current interpreter is written in C,
> which optimizes quite nicely.  There could be some speed improvement by

I should imagine that having a good garbage collection and efficient abstract
types and so on and so forth already available would help. And I'd similarly
expect that writing an optimizing compiler is far easier in a high level
language with powerful abstractions and code-rewriting and generation
facilities than in C.


> *compiling* Python into Lisp.  But a great number of the reasons Python
> isn't as fast as a fast Lisp has to do with semantic issues -- Python
> has certain flexibilities that make it harder to optimize.

What performance hindering flexibilities do you think python has and lisp
lacks?

> 
> But of course it's not impossible to compile into Lisp, perhaps with
> some advantages -- but why not introduce those same optimizations Lisp
> has into CPython, Psycho, Plex, Numeric, or other Python efforts?  I
> think that would actually be considerably easier.

All the high-performance Lisp implementations I know of are written in Lisp --
precisely because it would be too hard to write them in C. So lifting these
optimizations might not be all that easy.

> 
>   Ian
> 
> 

alex