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Python-to-C++ Compiler

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the calibrate-your-scales dept.

Mark Dufour writes "Shed Skin is an experimental Python-to-C++ compiler. It accepts pure, but implicitly statically typed, Python programs, and generates optimized C++ code. This means that, in combination with a C++ compiler, it allows for translation of pure Python programs into highly efficient machine language. For a set of 16 non-trivial test programs, measurements show a typical speedup of 2-40 over Psyco, about 12 on average, and 2-220 over CPython, about 45 on average. Shed Skin also outputs annotated source code."

3 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Very interesting... by FuzzyDaddy · · Score: 3, Informative
    This is a very interesting development, both from the practical promise and just 'cause it's cool. However, as a python programmer myself, it's not yet in a usable form. Much of the efficiency of programming in python is the standard libraries (in particular Tkinter for user interfaces), and the non-standard libraries (for example, the serial port library). This project does not yet support these.

    Among python programmers, I'm curious - how many use psyco (another python performance enhancement tool) for their projects? I fiddled with it a while ago (it didn't work because of a C module that it didn't like), but never had a compelling reason to go back to it. Performance optimization has never been important enough for my applications to merit the effort.

    --
    It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
  2. Re:Why not just use pure C++? by SigmoidCurve · · Score: 4, Informative

    bzerodi's point, made with Zen-like simplicity, is that language choice should be made to minimize programmer time, not machine time. I am at least a factor of ten more productive with Python than with C or C++. I am also far more confident in the correctness of what I write per line of Python than with what I write per line of C/C++.

    Yes, I have have wasted some time staring at the shell waiting and waiting for it to return from some complicated Python routine. I know that compiled C would faster, and hand-rolled assembler would be faster still. But I say to myself: hey, I wrote this code in a single afternoon, how many weeks of hair-pulling would it take to re-engineer this - and make it bug-free - in C? When I put it that way, I don't mind waiting the extra minutes for Python to do my dirty work.

    As a previous poster mentioned, the ability to handle tuples of mixed-types is critical. I look forward to seeing great things from Shed Skin in the future.

    --
    Dictionaries are for loosers.
  3. Re:Speaking from experience... by oblivion95 · · Score: 3, Informative

    "boo", a .NET language, allows dynamic typing by specifying 'duck' type. It achieves near-c# speed because all other data are statically typed.

    It's a great language -- combining the benefits of Python, Ruby, and C# -- and it's wonderful for proto-typing in the .NET world.