Re: Why not a Python compiler?

On 5 feb, 05:19, Santiago Romero <srom...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
( Surely if this question has been asked for a zillion of times... )
( and sorry for my english! )

I'm impressed with python. I'm very happy with the language and I
find Python+Pygame a very powerful and productive way of writing 2D
games. I'm not, at this moment, worried about execution speed of the
small game I'm working on (it runs at full 60 fps even in an old AMD-
K6 450 Laptop computer), but I continue asking me the same question:

Why not a Python COMPILER?

It would be very nice to be able to output Linux, MAC or Windows
binaries of compiled (not bytecompiled) code. It would run faster, it
will be smaller in size (I think) and it will be easy to distribute to
people not having python installed. Yes, I know about py2exe, but I'm
not sure if that's the right aproach.

So, what's wrong with compiling python?

Maybe is not possible due to nature of the language? Is just a
decision?

What do you think about this?


There are some projects aimed to speed up Python by a large margin.
Right now you can use psyco, which is considered to be feature
complete, and whose future relies on the Pypy project.

Pypy is a very ambitious project and it aims, amongst many other
goals, to provide a fast just-in-time python implementation.
They even say that the "secret goal is being faster than c, which is
nonsense, isn´t it?" (I still didn´t get the joke though...).

And finally, you have ShedSkin, a project developed by one lonely and
heroic coder (Mark Dufour).
Shedskin aims at being a static python compiler, which can translate a
subset of python to stand alone executables.
It also can compile extension modules for cpython.
It works by translating python to c++ and then to machine code.
The python code must be done in a static way (getting rid of dynamic
features like, for example, not asigning different types to the same
variable).

Luis
.

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