On: Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp

[dgfgfdagasdfgfa]

> But there are also interpreted interpreters aren't there?

I mean, not in use.... What would be the point? Every other interpreter worth using is AOT compiled, it's hardly something to boast about.

One exception might be JRuby, I suppose. Kind of a strange comparison to go out of your way to disabuse.

[mac01021 → dgfgfdagasdfgfa]

Not strange at all. The main language inspiring pixie is clojure, whose interpreter runs on the JVM. I might even go so far as to say that the main reason to use pixie is because you want to write clojure but can't afford to use a JVM for the task at hand

[jibalt → mac01021]

There's no such thing as the Clojure interpreter. Clojure programs are translated into Java bytecode, which runs on the JVM, which is a native program. (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3107299/how-do-clojure-pr...)

Pixie programs are translated into Pixie bytecode, which runs on the Pixie VM. Bytecode is, by definition, not "native".

[dgfgfdagasdfgfa → mac01021]

If we're going by the traditional idea of "bytecode interpreter" or "threaded interpreter", clojure is emphatically not one of them. It JIT compiles the lisp to JVM bytecode; the equivalent in Pixie would be JIT compiling to native code.

IIRC with RPython/pypy the two techniques are interleaved, but most users I've seen opt for some JIT optimization.