Hi Luis! Thanks for your reply :) Some further questions below...
> So its author decided that having a python implementation written in > python would laid a much better basis for implementing psyco-like > techniques. OK, so far I get it... I think. So it's implementing the Python interpreter in a Python subset called RPython, makes it more amenable to translation with psyco-like techniques. But how is this superior compared to CPython? Is it because Psyco is a specializer, which generate potentially different code for different sets of data? So the assumption is that the interpreter deals with a very specific set of data that Psyco will be able to make use to generate very efficient machine code? I still don't get how this can be superior to the hand-coded C version though? Also, this sounds like it involves implementing the Python's libraries that are currently implemented in C, in Python, so that they can be translated. Did I get that correctly? > This implementation requires a minimal core, writen in a restricted > subset of python called "rpython". This subset avoids many of the most > dynamic aspects of python, making it easier to authomatically translate > it to C through a tool that uses top-notch type inference techniques. OK, now I understand this bit about RPython, thanks. > This translated version of the rpython interpreter (which got already > auto-translated to c), is the basis of Pypy. Now I'm confused again--psyco translates Python into machine code--so how does this tie in with the fact that the interpreter written in Python is translated into another language (in this case C?) > However, I still doubt that I really understood it... > I'm still not sure if the type inference techniques will be used to > improve the performance of programs running on pypy, or if these > techniques were only intended for getting the rpython interpreter > translated to c. > > As far as I know, pypy is currently about 10/20 times slower than > cpython, although many optimizations remain to be done. > And I 'm not sure, but I think that its developers rely on the > psyco-like techniques to achieve the big speed boost their looking for. This is another one I don't get--this approach seems to imply that when PyPy is reasonably complete, it is expected that it'll be faster than CPython. I mean, I don't get how something that's translated into C can be faster than the handcoded C version? Thanks, Ray > > Luis -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
