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Comment by omaranto | Hacker News Reader

I haven't looked at the source for either but shouldn't PyPy's interpreter be easier to mess around with because it's written in Python (with some hints for the JIT)? Probably the thing that turns the interpreter into a JIT compiler is more sophisticated, but if you want to modify Python you wouldn't be looking at that part.

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Being a little pedantic: PyPy is written[1] in RPython[2], which is a strict subset of Python, and is quite restricted in many ways (E.g. when I was experimenting with it a while ago, all file operations, including reading/writing, were done with file descriptors (NB. it was a while ago, so this might've changed)).

So it's not as quite as easy to fiddle with as you might expect, but still significantly easier than CPython, I guess.

[1]: http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/architecture.html#pypy-the-pyt... [2]: http://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/faq.html#what-is-this-rpython-...

Watch this for a great presentation discussing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_HBRhcgeuQ

Not that they haven't gotten better. My point is that CPython has a different set of goals which makes it great for a reference implementation.

I might be sounding a bit futuristic, but I think reference implementations should be auto-generated from a "spec" lang.

I don't know if a language for doing something like that even exists. Does anyone know of something like this?

EDIT: I should clarify: a spec should be _high-level_, i.e. abstract away all the unimportant details. Perhaps unit tests would be better in this case. Perl 6 follows this model.

But it would be even better if one could some how "fill in the details" of the specs separately, from the spec, rather than mesh the whole thing into one giant C puddle.

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