On 11/04/2017 15:56, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
The truth is, all of us in this discussion -- including me -- are "random,
ignorant commentators". I don't believe that any of us are experts at
writing compilers.
Bart is a possible exception, for some definition of "expert" -- he claims
to have written a quite fast, moderately dynamic language, but nobody else
(that I know of) has used it.
And no offence to Bart, but from his comments and questions on the list, I
think it is fair to say that whatever knowledge he has on language design
was probably state of the art thirty years ago. Bart sometimes expresses
surprise and confusion over concepts which are common in languages like
Javascript, Python, Perl, Ruby etc. These are not young languages! Python
is over 20 years old, Perl is even older. So I suspect Bart's knowledge is
probably from the 70s or 80s?
Yes, about then. But it means I have a lot of experience getting this
stuff to work briskly on limited hardware, and I can identify bloat and
inefficiency.
(My latest project is a C compiler, which currently generates asm source
(later it will run from source like Python). But it takes 50ms to
process a 30Kloc file that then takes 90 seconds, nearly 2000 times
longer, to assemble into .obj. That sounds like there's something wrong
to me with that assembler.
So I think I can question the efficiency of other people's software. My
experience may be out of date but that 50ms - half of which is
generating that damned asm source - was from yesterday!)
However, when the obstacle is a particular language design then the
options are more limited. I think CPython does remarkably well given the
language. And the official byte-code (which can do with tweaking as that
Wpython project demonstrated).
--
bartc
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