Hey, I've been working on GCCPY since roughly november 2009 at least in its concept. It was announced as a Gsoc 2010 project and also a Gsoc 2011 project. I was mentored by Ian Taylor who has been an extremely big influence on my software development carrer.
Gccpy is an Ahead of time implementation of Python ontop of GCC. So it works as you would expect with a traditional compiler such as GCC to compile C code. Or G++ to compile C++ etc. Whats interesting and deserves a significant mention is my work is heavily inspired by Paul Biggar's phd thesis on optimizing dynamic languages and his work on PHC a ahead of time php compiler. I've had so many ups and down in this project and i need to thank Andi Hellmund for his contributions to the project. http://paulbiggar.com/research/#phd-dissertation The project has taken so many years as an in my spare time project to get to this point. I for example its taken me so long simply to understand a stabilise the core fundamentals for the compiler and how it could all work. The release can be found here. I will probably rename the tag to the milestone (lucy) later on. https://github.com/redbrain/gccpy/releases/tag/v0.1-24 (Lucy is our dog btw, German Shepard (6 years young) loves to lick your face off :) ) Documentation can be found http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/PythonFrontEnd. (Although this is sparse partialy on purpose since i do not wan't people thinking this is by any means ready to compile real python applications) I've found some good success with this project in compiling python though its largely unknown to the world simply because i am nervous of the compiler and more specifically the python compiler world. But at least to me there is at least to me an un-answered question in current compiler implementations. AOT vs Jit. Is a jit implementation of a language (not just python) better than traditional ahead of time compilation. What i can say is ahead of time at least strips out the crap needed for the users code to be run. As in people are forgetting the basics of how a computer works in my opinion when it comes to making code run faster. Simply need to reduce the number of instructions that need to be executed in order to preform what needs to be done. Its not about Jit and bla bla keyword llvm keyword instruction scheduling keyword bla. I could go into the arguments but i feel i should let the project speak for itself its very immature so you really cant compare it to anything like it but it does compile little bits and bobs fairly well but there is much more work needed. There is nothing at steak, its simply an idea provoked from a great phd thesis and i want to see how it would work out. I don't get funded of paid. I love working on compilers and languages but i don't have a day job doing it so its my little pet to open source i believe its at least worth some research. I would really like to hear the feedback good and bad. I can't describe how much work i've put into this and how much persistence I've had to have in light of recent reddit threads talking about my project. I have so many people to thank to get to this point! Namely Ian Taylor, Paul Biggar, Andi Hellmund, Cyril Roelandt Robert Bradshaw, PyBelfast, and the Linux Outlaws community. I really couldn't have got to this point in my life without the help of these people! Thanks! --Phil -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
