Other Python implementations [LWN.net]

Other Python implementations

Posted May 7, 2009 9:57 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Unladen swallow: accelerating Python

The article forgot to mention IronPython, which runs on the CLI virtual machine (.NET / Mono). Although perhaps that just runs on top of a virtual machine, rather than compiling Python programs directly into VM opcodes?

Shed Skin accepts a subset of Python and translates it to C++ which is then compiled to pure native code. It would be interesting to see how its performance compares to Unladen Swallow.

to post comments

Other Python implementations

Posted May 7, 2009 14:03 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (2 responses)

Shed skin is useless. It pretends python is a statically typed language.

Other Python implementations

Posted May 22, 2009 14:13 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Useless? If you consider the restrictions of Shed Skin and those of RPython, which is used as the implementation language in PyPy, there's a lot of overlap.

The sad thing is that because of people going round and pointing the finger at numerous projects claiming that they're "useless", progress on some of the more promising ones has been very slow. I'm not convinced that whole-program analysis will give the best bang for the buck with Python, but given that the author of Shed Skin is, as far as I'm aware, the only guy really doing anything in this area in Python and in public, calling it "useless" is just a continuation of the trend of narrow-mindedness that pushes everything but the current "favourite" to the margins, leading the developers of these marginalised projects to make pessimistic multi-year estimates about when their projects will supposedly be "useful" enough for the finger-pointers.

Other Python implementations

Posted Jun 2, 2009 14:18 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Okay how about: Shed skin is useless for real world python software.

It might make a useful tool for writing small subsets of python code for special purposes. RPython for example is not going to be adopted outside the pypy world becuase it's far less useful than Python for writing real code.

People put forth Shed Skin typically as a general python implementation, which it isn't. As a general python implementation it is useless, because it is not.

Maybe it's the next generation of Pyrexx.

Other Python implementations

Posted May 8, 2009 18:49 UTC (Fri) by amk (subscriber, #19) [Link]

Of some relevance: video of the "Python VMs" panel discussion at PyCon 2009 is at http://blip.tv/file/1947197/ .