> ShedSkinwill probably have scaling problems: as the program size > grows it may need too much time to infer all the types. The author has > the strict policy of refusing any kind of type annotation, this make > it unpractical.
well, I admit I really don't like manual type annotations (unless for documentation purposes). it seems a much nicer (..pythonic) approach to just get type information from a profiler. if I had four hands (and two brains), shedskin would probably already include one. that said, I know of several ways to improve the scalability shedskin's type analysis itself, and I might still pursue those. but I think, in combination with a profiler, things should scale pretty well already.. certainly enough to compile most smallish programs/extension modules of up to a few thousands lines. > And, despite your interest inShedSkin, so far very few people have > given a hand actually developing SS (I think partially well, it's been quite a few people actually, about 15 that have contributed substantial improvements. of course doing a compiler like this is probably more than 10 person-years of work, so I could always use more help. becauseShedSkinPython sources aren't much hackable. This is very bad for an > OpenSource project), so I think the author now has lost part of the I think they are reasonably hackable for the most part, and this can only improve. in the beginning I had little documentation, and there was just this 7000-line Python file :-) now things are more split up, and I even added documentation recently to each part. yes, type inference will always be hard to hack on, but that's only one part. the C++ side, where I can arguably use most help, and which consists of more than half of the code, has always been easily hackable. > will to develop this project (but probably we'll see one of two more > versions). I have my ups and downs of course, but at the moment I'm quite enthousiastic about the whole thing, in part because people are actually contributing. a new release is coming up, with support for datetime and ConfigParser among many other improvements/fixes, and there is a much faster set implementation in the pipeline. at the moment, I have no plans to halt development at all. > For me so far the most viable way to produce a faster Python system > seems a version of CPython with Cython and something Psyco-like built- > in (and a built-in compiler on Windows, like MinGW 4.2.1), maybe with > some syntax support in the Python language, allowing to mix statically > compiled Python code with dynamically compiled Python code in an easy > way (as CLisp sometimes does). shedskin can of course generate extension modules (shedskin -e), that can be imported from larger Python programs. it's a bit clumsy, as only builtins can be passed to/from shedskin, and everything (args, return values) is copied recursively, but it can be quite useful already. and of course it can only improve as well.. mark. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
