OT: This Swift thing

[Alain Ketterlin]

Sturla Molden <sturla.molden at gmail.com> writes:

> On 05/06/14 10:14, Alain Ketterlin wrote:
>
>> Type safety.
>
> Perhaps. Python has strong type safety.

Come on.

[...]
>>(And with it comes better performance ---read battery
>> life--- and better static analysis tools, etc.)
>
> Perhaps, perhaps not. My experience is that only a small percentage of
> the CPU time is spent in the Python interpreter.
[...]

Basically, you're saying that a major fraction of python programs is
written in another language. An interesting argument...

>> LLVM (an Apple-managed project) for the middle- and back-end, and a
>> brand new front-end incorporating a decent type system (including
>> optional types for instance).
>
> Numba uses LLVM.

As far as I know, Numba deals only with primitive types. You will gain
nothing for classes. (And Numba is a JIT.)

> When I compile Cython modules I use LLVM on this computer.

Cython is not Python, it is another language, with an incompatible
syntax.

>> Swift's memory management is similar to python's (ref. counting). Which
>> makes me think that a subset of python with the same type safety would
>> be an instant success.
>
> A Python with static typing would effectively be Cython :)

I don't think so. The various proposals mentioned elsewhere in this
thread give concrete examples of what static typing would look like in
Python.

-- Alain.