Project Aims For 5x Increase In Python Performance

cocoanaut writes "A new project launched by Google's Python engineers could make the popular programming language five times faster. The project, which is called Unladen Swallow, seeks to replace the Python interpreter's virtual machine with a new just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that is built on LLVM. The first milestone release, which was announced at PyCon, already offers a 15-25% performance increase over the standard CPython implementation. The source code is available from the Google Code web site."

Comments

This is a very interesting project

[Max Romantschuk]

I read about what they intend to do, and they seem to have quite a few interesting ideas... But there are also major drawbacks:

- No Windows support (apparently a Linux-only VM in the plans)
- No Python 3.0 support

And thus no guarantees most of the work will merge back into CPython.

But competition is good, I can't really see a problem with having an alternative faster Python runtime, even if it's not as compatible as CPython. :)

Re:Kill the GIL!

[eosp]

The summary misses one of the best bits -- the project will try to get rid of the Global Interpreter Lock that interferes so much with multithreading.

Good luck with that. The last time someone tried that, they slowed Python down by half.

Re:Kill the GIL!

[Nevyn]

Then you probably want to read: Patrick Logan on why SMT isn't "awesomez".