Am 14.02.21 um 11:12 schrieb Paul Rubin:
Christian Gollwitzer <aurio...@gmx.de> writes:
He wants that neoGFX is scriptable in Python, but instead of linking
with CPython, he will write his own Python implementation instead,
because CPython is slow/not clean/ whatever. He doesn't seem to
understand that this is an enormous task on its own, because the
interesting part of a scripting language is the standard library with
many decade-years of work.
I wonder how big an issue the stdlib really is. Lots of it is written
in Python and can port to another interpreter. Lots more is CPython C
API bindings to external C libraries (e.g. OpenSSL) so porting those
would be a matter of rebinding those libraries to libffi in the cases
where that hasn't been done already.
I'm not saying that it is unfeasible or very difficult. I'm saying that
it is a lot of work, and for a single developer who has this as a side
project / support for his graphics engine and who wants to beat existing
implementations wrt. speed, I'm saying it is going to take a lot of
time. It'definitely impossible by "defining a few JSON schema files", as
Leigh claims with his "universal compiler". There definitely IS a lot of
stuff in a baseline CPython interpreter - a (seemingly) simple thing
like "print" will have an implementation of 1000 lines in C with all the
formatting library, file I/O etc. Arbitrary precision integers - another
library, networking - yet another and so on.
CPython really is pretty slow, maybe because it uses so much boxed data,
derps around with refcounts all the time, suffers memory fragmentation
from not having a relocating GC, etc. And that is before we even
mention the GIL.
I don't argue with that. CPython is slow. But I'm arguing that you can't
make it faster by multiple orders of magnitude unless you change the
language. For numerical code, straight-forward C is usually 100x to
1000x faster than Python, and you can reach the same performance by
giving up dynamic typing - Cython demonstrates this quite convincingly.
If you don't want static typing (with types close to the machine like
fixed-width integers) than you'll have to resort to a LOT of black magic
to even come close (PyPy, modern JS engines, ....)
Christian
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
