Well, first and foremost, when I said that I leave the door open for further explanations, I meant explanations by other people more knowlegeable than me :-)
> 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?) No, the psyco-like techniques come later, after the rpython interpreter is auto-translated to c. They are not used to translate the interpreter to c (this is done through a tool that uses type inference, flow-graph anailisis, etc, etc). Getting the rpython auto-translated to C is the first goal of the project (already achieved). That means having a minimal core, writen in a low level language (c for speed) that hasn't been writen by hand, but auto-translated to c from the python source -> much easier to improve and maintain from now on. Think about this: improving and maintaining a hand coded c implementation like cpython is a nightmare. The more complex the code, the more dificult is its improvement and experimentation. Now, they have it all written in python (rpython) instead, which is easier, nicer and more flexible. And this python code can get authomatically translated to C (no hand coding, this is done by the tool I mentioned above). Now this is both, a conclusion and a question (because I also have many doubts about it :-): At this moment, the traslated python-in-python version is, or intends to be, something more or less equivalenet to Cpython in terms of performance. Because it is in essence almost the same thing: another C python implementation. The only difference is that while Cpython was written by hand, pypy was writen in python and auto-translated to C. What remains to be done now is implementing the psyco-like techniques for improving speed (amongst many other things, like stackless, etc). Luis -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
