I was talking to a friend of mine about the speed of Python code. One of the questions that came up was why is a JIT compiler like Psyco faster than the Python byte-compiler? I understand why languages like Pyrex are faster, since they set static types that the compiler can use to optimize. But why is Psyco faster? I would think that any optimizations that Psyco makes could just as easily be made by the byte-compiler, but obviously this is not the case, since Psyco runs something like 4x faster, and I also understand that similar speedups are seen by Java JIT compilers. What am I missing? Thanks in advance.
Rick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
