Comment by amix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amix | Hacker News Reader

I did a benchmark of Unladed Swallow 1.5 years ago and at this time PyPy looked like a very academic project. It could not really run any interesting code. At this time Unladed Swallow looked like a great project since improving cPython rather than starting from scratch seemed much easier, especially since Unladed Swallow based their JIT optimization on LLVM's JIT engine.

I also recall reading PyPy's blog, especially a blog post about their Prolog based JIT prototype and I thought "wow, this sure seems like a complicated way to implement a JIT engine, I wonder if they will ever implement something that can run real code".

Fast forward to today and Unladed Swallow is dead and PyPy has implemented a Python implementation that's compatible with Python 2.7 and beats cPython 2.6 on various benchmarks. Pretty impressive and kudos to the PyPy team.

Exactly my thoughts -- it seemed like a crazy research project, generating an interpreter written in C, and ones for jvm and clr. And it has 3 different pluggable garbage collectors apparently.

But I'm impressed that it actually runs my code, in contrast to the other alternative Python implementations I've tried.

Look forward to seeing more of sandboxed mode, which has been a much desired feature of CPython for many years now. And stackless mode. I just hope they can get the executable size and build times to a reasonable level.

Many people seem to ignore that pypy is not a new project. It's been on the works for more than 8 years now.

It's also had a lot of funding, and more full time workers than on CPython (who has zero full time coders).

Unladen Swallow isn't dead, actually -- it just merged into the main CPython code base. The first few quarters of optimizations are in Python 2.7 (it's noticeably faster than Python2.6) and the more adventurous bits are on separate branches in SVN.

somewhere on the net are comments i made about european idealists v american pragmatists (the whole "worse is better" thing).

i have never been so glad to be proved completely wrong :o)

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