[Python-Dev] Pie-thon at OSCON 2004? (original) (raw)

A.M. Kuchling amk at amk.ca
Thu Jul 15 00:30:19 CEST 2004

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 04:45:23PM -0500, Skip Montanaro wrote:

Have Guido and Dan been practicing their aim with a pie? The topic of the Python/Parrot shootout hasn't come up in awhile. I thought I'd ask since OSCON 2K4 is only a couple weeks away.

An outdated weblog entry I wrote: http://www.amk.ca/diary/archives/cat_python.html#003176. I'll try to write another update once I actually get it to run Python code.

Serious development activity in Parrot CVS started a few days before the end of June. At this point there are a few basic data types (string, int, float, lists, complex), a subset of the built-in functions (divmod, hex, chr, etc. -- map/filter/reduce are the most complicated ones implemented), and exceptions work to some degree. It can run a version of the pi() function in b0.py that's been rewritten to not use yield. Single-parent classes are being implemented at this point, but it's not clear whether they work at all; ask again in a few days.

Can they finish within the time available? I'm not sure; Python is a relatively small language but it's not that small, and there's still a lot left to do. The approach being taken is translating the bytecode; there's a languages/python/piethon.pl script that takes a .pyc and produces a Parrot assembly file. There's some subtlety to invoking it, though, because the PASM produced doesn't actually assemble for me. I haven't yet figured out how to run a snippet of Python code using Parrot, so this assessment comes from looking at the code. (This means I obviously don't have any performance numbers either.)

I forget the terms of the bet; is it running on Python 2.3.4, or the 2.4alpha1 release, or on Python CVS? Maybe we should check that 2.4CVS hasn't regressed in performance when compared to 2.3.

--amk

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