Re: [pypy-dev] a faster Python not a primary goal of PyPy? (original) (raw)

Martijn Faassen wrote:

Christian Tismer wrote: [snip]

That's the point. Not prioritizing speed is fine, but it does not allow us to be remarkably slower. Being of competitive speed and then more flexible is a must. If we are slower, the market will not consider us at all.

That's true, and that's a useful clarification. It's still different from the impression you're giving out, where you're strongly implying at least to me that speed will be significantly *faster* eventually with PyPy. Then again, it's forgivable that some hype is used to attract interest to the project.

I thik I'm the worst speed junkie in the project, and I'm holding my breath a little until I'm convinced that we can be fast. ATM I'm quite vague about that, because of the complexity of crucial parts of our system, and the fact that I don't understand how we are going to translate that into speedy code without very high level optimization techniques. I simply can't tell whether we can reach this without major hand-rewriting or whether we can gather the missing speed factor by applying JIT technology. I always thought that the initial big step of creating an initial binary of reasonable speed would be an easy, first step.

But it turned out to be a huge step which is by far not in the shape it should be. This amount of my misestimation makes me nervous and stops me from praising PyPy's speed all too loudly.

On the other hand, we have extremely efficient results on the low level side. RPython programs have been shown to become possibly very fast. This is an area where I have no doubt making promises, and that's why I proposed to put some more effort there and at least provide a tool to produce fast extension modules from RPython, soon. This is also the reason why I want to make RPython more complete and easier to use.

For sure we never have put any hype onto PyPy just to make it more attractive. We learned that flexibility and speed are not trivial to marry, and we have proven our claims about flexibility, but unfortunately not yet on speed. I would really hate to retract this claim. ATM, there is simply no prognosis possible.

cheers - chris

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