Simon Faulkner wrote: > Pardon me if this has been done to death but I can't find a simple > explanation. > > I love Python for it's ease and speed of development especially for the > "Programming Challenged" like me but why hasn't someone written a > compiler for Python? > > I guess it's not that simple eh?
The "simple" explanation for the lack of a Python compiler is the massive dynamisism (sp) in Python - since you can change practically everything at any time, in order to compile a generic python program, you have to effectively include the entire interpreter. It's been done before (Python2C was the name, I think), but there wasn't much of a speed-up vs. CPython, and it hasn't been updated to work with recent versions of Python. Recently there has been work on JIT type dynamic compilation techniques, and static compilation of a reduced Python subset. If you want to know more, look up the PyPy project. http://www.codespeak.net/pypy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list