unladen swallow: python and llvm

[Tim Wintle]

On Sun, 2009-06-07 at 16:40 -0600, Brian wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com>
> wrote:
>         It is an interesting idea for a number of reasons, the main
>         one as far
>         as I'm concerned is that it is more of a port of CPython to a
>         new
>         architecture than a complete re-invention of python (like
>         PyPy /
>         IronPython / jython) so stands a chance of being merged back
>         into
>         CPython.
> 
> Blatant fanboyism. PyPy also has a chance of being merged back into
> Python trunk.

How?

I believe that unladen swallow has already had many of it's
optimisations back-ported to CPython, but I can't see how backporting a
python interpreter written in python into C is going to be as easy as
merging from Unladen swallow, which is (until the llvm part) a branch of
CPython.


Personally, I think that PyPy is a much better interpreter from a
theoretical point of view, and opens up massive possibilities for
writing interpreters in general. Unladen Swallow on the other hand is
something we can use _now_ - on real work, on real servers. It's a more
interesting engineering project, and something that shouldn't require
re-writing of existing python code.


Tim W



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