Opinions on Unladen Swallow?
- by vartec
What are your opinions and expectations on Google's Unladen Swallow? From their project plan:
We want to make Python faster, but we
also want to make it easy for large,
well-established applications to
switch to Unladen Swallow.
Produce a version of Python at least 5x faster than CPython.
Python application performance should be stable.
Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython
applications.
Maintain source-level compatibility with CPython extension
modules.
We do not want to maintain a Python implementation forever; we view
our work as a branch, not a fork.
And even sweeter:
In addition, we intend to remove the
GIL and fix the state of
multithreading in Python. We believe
this is possible through the
implementation of a more sophisticated
GC
It almost looks too good to be true, like the best of PyPy and Stackless combined.
More info:
Jesse Noller: "Pycon: Unladen-Swallow"
ArsTechnica: "Google searches for holy grail of Python performance"
Update: as DNS pointed out, there was related question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/695370/what-is-llvm-and-how-is-replacing-python-vm-with-llvm-increasing-speeds-5x