So I kind of wanted to ask this question on the pypy mailing list.. but there's only a pypy-dev list, and I don't want to put noise on the dev list.
What's the point of RPython? By this, I don't mean "What is RPython"? I get that. I mean, why? The goals of the pypy project seems to be to create a fast python implementation. I may be wrong about this, as the goals seem a little amorphous if you look at their home page. So, to do that this RPython compiler was created? Except that it doesn't compile python, it compiles a static subset of python that has type inference like ML. This RPython thing seems like a totally unnecessary intermediate step. Instead of writing an implementation of one language, there's an implementation of two languages. Actually, it seems like it harms the ultimate goal. For the interpreted pyton to be fast, the interpreter has to be written in a reasonably fast language. ML, and C++ compilers have had a lot of work put into their optimization steps. A lot of the performance boost you get from a static language is that knowing the types at compile time lets you inline code like crazy, unroll loops, and even execute code at compile time. RPython is a statically typed language because I guess the developers associate static languages with speed? Except that they use it to generate C code, which throws away the type information they need to get the speed increase. Huh? I thought the goal was to write a fast dynamic language, not a slow static one? Is this going anywhere or is this just architecture astronautics? The RPython project seems kind of interseting to me and I'd like to see more python implementations, but looking at the project I can't help but think that they haven't really explained *why* they are doing the things they are doing. Anyway, I can tell this is the sort of question that some people will interpret as rude. Asking hard questions is never polite, but it is always necessary :) Thanks, Brendan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
