Python & Go

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 14 Nov 2009 11:14:04 +0000, kj wrote:

> In <7xpr7lixnn.fsf at ruckus.brouhaha.com> Paul Rubin
> <http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> writes:
> 
>>It seems a little weird to me that they (Google) are concerned with the
>>speed of the compiler, indicating that they plan to write enormous
>>programs in the language.
> 
> Fast compilation also means that Go can conceivably become an attractive
> alternative to interpreted languages, because the compilation stage can
> be made as unobtrusive as, say, Python's byte-compilation stage (except
> that the Go compiler is generating native code).


Python (like many other languages) already has unobtrusive compilation. 
That's why you get .pyc files, and that's what the compile() built-in 
function does. It is compilation to byte-code rather than machine-code, 
but still.

Psyco does JIT compilation to machine-code for CPython, at the cost of 
much extra memory. It's also limited to 32-bit Intel processors. The aim 
of the PyPy project is to (eventually) make JIT machine-code compilation 
available to any Python, on any machine.


-- 
Steven