socialmedian: Alex Gaynor: Introduction to Unladen Swallow

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Alex Gaynor: Introduction to Unladen Swallow

Submitted by Jgmize from Google Reader

Nov 03, 2009

Summary

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year (or have zero interest in either Python or dynamic languages, it which case why are you here?) you've probably heard of Unladen Swallow. Unladen Swallow is a Google funded branch of the CPython interpreter, with a goal of making CPython significantly faster while retaining both API and ABI compatibility. In this post I'm going to try to explain what it is Unladen Swallow is doing to bring a new burst of speed to the Python world.

In terms of virtual machines there are a few levels of complexity, which roughly correspond to their speed. The simplest type of interpreter is an AST evaluator, these are more or less the lowest of the low on the speed totem poll, up until YARV was merged into the main Ruby interpreter, MRI (Matz Ruby Interpreter) was this type of virtual machine. The next level of VM is a bytecode interpreter, this means that the language is compiled to an intermediary format (bytecode) which is then executed. Strictly speaking this is an exceptionally broad category which encompasses mos ...Read the full article

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