[Tutor] General Programming Question

Danny Yoo dyoo@hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu
Tue, 26 Jun 2001 16:33:27 -0700 (PDT)


On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, D-Man wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 01:40:52PM -0700, Israel Evans wrote:
> | 
> | In response to Dierdre on a slight deviation from the topic...
> | 
> | I'd like to know if there was a way to compile Python to native machine
> | code, would it run as fast as say C++ or Java?  If it did would there be
> 
> Depending on how complex you get you can use Jython to compile to Java
> byte-code, then use gcj to get native machine code.  Will it be
> faster?  Probably not since Python is so dynamic that the compilers
> don't really know anything.  Also, when jythonc compiles to java
> bytecode it generates some Java source that basically consists of
> calls to the interpreter.  The python is still being interpreted one
> way or the other.

ActiveState is working on a .NET compiler for Python:

    http://www.activestate.com/Initiatives/NET/Research.html

so, with luck, we'll get blazingly fast compiled Python some day... but I
think it will take a while.

Hope this helps!