March 28, 2009 at 22:02Python will try to teach flying
Everyone’s beloved Google Corporation decided to become even more beloved by announcing the Unladen Swallow project , whose goal is to accelerate the execution of Python scripts exactly five times.
To achieve this goal, developers want to change the lock mechanism, recycle the garbage collector to work in non-blocking mode, improve tools for creating multi-threaded programs, optimize work on multi-core CPUs by parallelizing computations, and most importantly, replace the standard Python interpreter virtual machine with an LLVM-based one JIT compiler that translates scripts into executable code on the fly.
The new interpreter is not a "bike", and is based on the standard CPython 2.6.1 code, having full compatibility with it.
In the current slice, Unladen Swallow managed to achieve work acceleration of 15-25%, only thanks to additional optimizations without replacing the virtual machine. The new virtual machine will be integrated in the second quarter of this year.
In addition, Google strives to return patches to the base Python interpreter to the maximum, ultimately fully integrating all of their developments into standard CPython and adapting development for the Python 3 branch.
PS This news should especially please MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which decided to use Python instead of Scheme.
To achieve this goal, developers want to change the lock mechanism, recycle the garbage collector to work in non-blocking mode, improve tools for creating multi-threaded programs, optimize work on multi-core CPUs by parallelizing computations, and most importantly, replace the standard Python interpreter virtual machine with an LLVM-based one JIT compiler that translates scripts into executable code on the fly.
The new interpreter is not a "bike", and is based on the standard CPython 2.6.1 code, having full compatibility with it.
In the current slice, Unladen Swallow managed to achieve work acceleration of 15-25%, only thanks to additional optimizations without replacing the virtual machine. The new virtual machine will be integrated in the second quarter of this year.
In addition, Google strives to return patches to the base Python interpreter to the maximum, ultimately fully integrating all of their developments into standard CPython and adapting development for the Python 3 branch.
PS This news should especially please MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which decided to use Python instead of Scheme.