Irmen de Jong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Back in the days my port of Python to the Commodore Amiga machine ran > quite comfortably on a 50 mhz CPU with 4 Mb of RAM. (ok ok it was > Python 1.5.2, that has to be said).
Even that sounds way too slow. Kyoto Common Lisp started in a few seconds on a Microvax-class machine, and an Alpha running Vax emulation should be at least as fast as that. Python shouldn't have especially worse startup overhead than KCL unless it's doing something silly. I'd try running Python under a profiler and figure out what's slowing it down. I don't understand the point of developing something in Lua on a Unix system. Lua is a cute scripting language that's easier to embed and sandbox than Python and is smaller, but the language itself is not nearly as nice to code in. I suggested Lua because I was imagining some kind of memory-limited embedded application that needed a lightweight extension language without too much of an OS interface, and Lua is good for that. Using it to write a compiler sounds masochistic. If there's an obstacle to using Python, I'd even consider using KCL (or its current incarnation), which has its own compiler (compiles Lisp to C code) among other things. It does need several MB of memory. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
