Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear, the reason I didn't (and won't) accept nuitka as a compiler is that it doesn't do what actual compilers do, it just plays around with bytecode. I experienced no speed difference when running large programs, but the startup is considerably slower. To me, it is just a docker replacement that is 1/10th as portable.

View on HN

A compiler doesn't need to optimize. I think if it takes Python code, and translates it to something else, it's a compiler. An optimizing compiler is the one that will give you speedups.

And Nuitka does optimize: https://nuitka.net/doc/user-manual.html#optimization

Then it's an optimizing compiler for sure.

"plays around with bytecode"? Even if that is so, it translates the whole program to c++, which is then compiled. It relies on libpython to implement a lot of the core language types and such, so if your program isn't very computationally intensive or makes heavy use of core data types, you might not notice much, but it's definitely a compiler.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com