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Wednesday, August 11, 2004

May the best VM win?

A good deal more information on pycore, the Python implemented in VisualWorks Smalltalk. The good news is based on a fairly simple implementation, not on the performance-oriented ideas still in design. So is the race on for comparing the performance of pycore and IronPython? IronPython is more complete, but performance-wise, pycore is showing more potential at this point.

Quoting from the pycore item...

The interpreter is currently complete, except for 'exec'; the simple translator is substantially behind; and the optimized translator is only at the design stage. Nevertheless, some Python programs run faster even with the pycore simple translator than with CPython, for example:

  • Recursive fibonacci function, 9x faster
  • Iterating over a large list of integers, 5x faster
  • Creating a list element-by-element, 2x faster
  • Accessing an attribute by calling a method, 2.5x faster

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Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.