D vs VM-based platforms

Daniel Keep daniel.keep.lists at gmail.com
Mon Apr 30 18:25:06 PDT 2007



Jan Claeys wrote:
> Well, in practice most Python code just runs on the Python bytecode
> interpreter (and in most other cases on the Java or .NET VMs), and with
> a good reason.
> ...

The really interesting stuff on Python is happening over at the PyPy[1]
project.  They're basically trying to write a Python interpreter in a
restricted subset of Python called RPython, which can then be translated
into other formats like C or LLVM.

One of the really weird things is that you can run various
transformations over the RPython code to change how it works without
ever having to rewrite any of the actual code.  The classic example of
this is integrating Stackless Python into the interpreter by basically
throwing a switch.

It's all very cool, and really hard to understand. :P

	-- Daniel

[1] http://codespeak.net/pypy/

-- 
int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll.
              // guaranteed to be random.
}

http://xkcd.com/

v2sw5+8Yhw5ln4+5pr6OFPma8u6+7Lw4Tm6+7l6+7D
i28a2Xs3MSr2e4/6+7t4TNSMb6HTOp5en5g6RAHCP  http://hackerkey.com/



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list