[Pythonmac-SIG] What's MacPython missing?

[Michael Hudson]

Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> writes:

> On Thursday, Oct 16, 2003, at 07:40 America/New_York, Michael Hudson
> wrote:
>
>> Bob Ippolito <bob at redivi.com> writes:
>>
>>> I'm interested to know what people here would like to see for
>>> MacPython.
>>> 	Which modules from other platforms would you really like to see?
>>> 	Which Apple APIs/Frameworks would you like to use but aren't
>>> 	wrapped or aren't wrapped satisfactorily?
>>> 	What documentation do you think needs to be written/improved
>>> 	(specifically)?
>>>
>>> These are a few of the things I'm interested in:
>> [...]
>>> 	An optimized PPC backend for Psyco (I'm kind of working on
>>> 	this on and off.. at the PPC ASM compiler/decompiler stage)
>>
>> Hey, me too!  Armin was of the opinion that this would be seriously
>> hard (i.e. about as hard as writing psyco for x86 was) until psyco is
>> ready to become part of PyPy, though.
>
> I think having all those extra registers around, and the fact that
> most of the operations take a destination and two operands instead of
> just dest and src, might make it a bit nicer.

Oh sure.  That wasn't what I meant.

> But then again, the fact that Psyco was designed for x86 might mean
> that it would be hard to take advantage of.  I really don't know,
> it's been a while since I've looked at the source.

For one thing, I think there are some x86-isms in the source (e.g
expecting stack based calling conventions) and for another the source
is just a bitch.  It certainly confused me plenty.

[bgen2]
>> Do you know anything concrete about gcc-xml?
>
> I know that it's a real bitch to compile on OS X (but I did).. it's
> very odd.  It must work to some degree because Pyste uses it, but I
> haven't taken a serious look at the output.  It seems like one of
> those XML formats where you need to write a pretty significant
> translator from it to a data structure worth using.

Yeah, but less translating than from an arbitrary C header, right?
<wink>.  It would be depressing if gcc-xml sucked, because something
like that is so obviously the right answer.  Guess I should take a
look myself...

Cheers,
mwh

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