Hi William, On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 7:26 AM, William Dode <w...@flibuste.net> wrote: > Hi (as a simple user), > > I'd like to know why you didn't followed the same way as V8 Javascript, > or the opposite, why for V8 they didn't choose llvm ? > > I imagine that startup time and memory was also critical for V8.
Startup time and memory usage are arguably *more* critical for a Javascript implementation, since if you only spend a few milliseconds executing Javascript code, but your engine takes 10-20ms to startup, then you've lost. Also, a minimized memory profile is important if you plan to embed your JS engine on a mobile platform, for example, or you need to run in a heavily-multiprocessed browser on low-memory consumer desktops and netbooks. Among other reasons we chose LLVM, we didn't want to write code generators for each platform we were targeting. LLVM has done this for us. V8, on the other hand, has to implement a new code generator for each new platform they want to target. This is non-trivial work: it takes a long time, has a lot of finicky details, and it greatly increases the maintenance burden on the team. We felt that requiring python-dev to understand code generation on multiple platforms was a distraction from what python-dev is trying to do -- develop Python. V8 still doesn't have x86-64 code generation working on Windows (http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=330), so I wouldn't underestimate the time required for that kind of project. Thanks, Collin Winter _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
