

Unladen Swallow  can now compile all Python code to native code using LLVM - kirubakaran
http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/Release2009Q2

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thorax
I desperately want to see benchmark comparisons with psyco. There are some
applications where psyco does a great job and the second this beats that my
excitement level will go through the roof.

As it stands, I'm already very excited about this.

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callahad
This is secondhand information, but apparently at the PyCon VM Summit this
year the Unladen Swallow guys mentioned that they were already faster than
Psyco for Youtube's workload.

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0wned
I Love Python and would use it more if it were easier to build stand-alone,
compiled native apps from it (I used Python many years before the phrase 'Web
2.0' came about). I use pyinstaller right now and have use py2exe in the past
to build native, end-client distributal code, but now I just use C++ for those
cases.

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icey
Unfortunately I don't know how much this will help. I think LLVM will add like
7mb to any python exe distribution.

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nopassrecover
7mb doesn't seem too bad in this age of fast net and big hard drives as
compared to the inconvenience of what other method you get Python running on
an end-user system.

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oconnor0
I used to agree, but then I went to central eastern Africa (Burundi). 7mb
takes a long time to download on a 3kbps connection. I'm not so sure now.
There's a long tail of people with slow connections & small hard drives. I
guess this issue is whether or not you care about supporting them.

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ShabbyDoo
A huge percentage of the Python code out there is server-side stuff. So, if
you only have a 3kbit connection at your disposal, you're probably not going
to have much luck deploying your application either.

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oconnor0
For server-side, no.

And it seemed like the discussion was about distrubuting client-side apps
written in Python using Unladen Swallow.

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tl
Shouldn't there be max along with min and avg? Std dev is higher in many
cases. Could there be an issue where max (worst case) has worse performance in
Unladen Swallow?

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imbaczek
max is useless in benchmarking; there's no upper limit on how long any
computation can take.

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kragen
If that were true, real-time software would be impossible. (Unless you're
talking about the risk of your hardware malfunctioning, I guess.) Practically
speaking, max can be useful.

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jnoller
I'm very happy the unladen-swallow team is making progress like this. Collin
and Jeffery have done a fantastic job.

~~~
sparky
It's impressive that they were able to beat 2009Q1 even by using LLVM naively.
Looks like their first few releases are the software analog of Intel's tick-
tock strategy (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock>), and it looks
like we're in for a hell of a 'tock' in 3 months. Keep up the good work guys!

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stefano
I'd like to see how it compares to Self and SBCL.

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rbanffy
That would be like comparing oranges to rhinoceros.

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stefano
Why are they so different? Both Self and Unladen Swallow compile two highly
dynamic languages just-in-time.

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jhawk28
Looks like some good performance increases. Seems to have a memory hit. That
will be looked at next release.

