castironpi wrote:
Similarly, I take it that the decision to make CPython a stack machine + VM was a design decision, not a necessity, favoring internal simplicity over the extra 5%.
Years ago, someone once started a project to write a register-based virtual machine for (C)Python. I suspect it was abandoned for some combination of lack of time and preliminary results showing little speedup for the increased complication. But I never saw any 'final report'.
And furthermore, I think I'm getting confused about what exactly constitutes an interpreter: it is whether there is a process that runs product instructions, or the product instructions can run standalone. I would take 'compiler' to mean, something that outputs an .EXE executable binary file,
This is way too restrictive. Does *nix have no compilers? In any case, the CPython compiler uses stadard compiler components: lexer, parser, syntax tree, code generator, and peephole optimizer. The result is a binary file (.pyc for Python compiled) executable on a PyCode machine.
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