On 2009-11-13, at 17:42, Robert Brown wrote, quoting me: > ... Python *the language* is specified in a way that > makes executing Python programs quickly very very difficult. That is untrue. I have mentioned before that optional declarations integrate well with dynamic languages. Apart from CL and Scheme, which I have mentioned several times, you might check out Strongtalk (typed Smalltalk), and Dylan, which was designed for high-performance compilation, though to my knowledge no Dylan compilers ever really achieved it.
> I'm tempted to > say it's impossible, but great strides have been made recently with JITs, so > we'll see. > If you want to know why Python *the language* is slow, look at the Lisp code > CLPython generates and at the code implementing the run time. Simple > operations end up being very expensive. Does the object on the left side of a > comparison implement compare? No, then does the right side implement it? No, > then try something else .... I've never looked at CLPython. Did it use a method cache (see Peter Deutsch's paper on Smalltalk performance in the unfortunately out-of-print `Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice'? That technique is 30 years old now. I have more to say, but I'll do that in responding to Bob's next post. -- v -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
