Unladen Swallow

[thantik]

Anyone tested this out yet? - I dont have any ready-made VM images to really mess around with it. Apparently by second half of 2009 theyre looking at a 2x-5x speedup by using LLVM based JIT and Reworking how garbage collection works along with making threads work a lot better.

Info here:
CODE
http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan


I had posted back on this board a while back when I was interested in java but Python was just so simple and so darn easy for rapid development I swapped - So this was interesting to me, figured I'd post it here and ask a couple questions about developer experience.

I figured at least Eniko would have an interest in it.
Are there other Python stacks that would give a performance boost as an alternative to the regular main-line python? I'm looking at things like PyPy that have similar features.

 

[sindbad]

It's supposed to be just a branch of CPython, not a fork. So changes are being pushed to mainline CPython asap.

Yes, it promises a lot. And parts of youtube now run on unladden, so it'll probably be well tested.

PyPy is even more ambitious, but not because of performance. Right now without the JIT it's at most 2x slower than CPython and with a primitive JIT much faster (still slower than psyco though). May yeild amazing speedups, but not right now. And won't work with all C extensions right away.

Jython is sometimes faster, but it needs a fast JVM. Which we aren't quite sure of for the pandora.

IronPython is the least mature and mono isn't terribly fast either.

Your best bet right now is still to profile and rewrite any horribly slow functions in Cython or plain C and use through ctypes. Same for when you really need threads in CPU bound code.

 

[dflemstr]

Hmm, interesting indeed...
Now there's one less reason for me not to use python
For now I'll stick to Scala, Java, Erlang and C++(or any combination thereof), though.