alt Hacker NewsPython is a poor target for compilation, even the best JIT is never gonna make fundamental design flaws (that some may consider beloved features) disappear. It's never going to give "good" performance.
In my view, the right course of action is to specify an official strictly typed subset of the language with compilation and static analysis as the justification, then implement both JIT and AOT on top of that. Legacy code can be rewritten or thrown out in phases, C extensions can be ported.
Of course, any such proposal would invite monumental amounts of bikeshedding, which is why it wouldn't get far, much like the JIT proposal.
Replies
tkcranny • yesterday at 7:53 PM
That’s effectively what Mojo is. Hardly catching the world on fire but pretty good for what it does.
> strictly typed subset of the language with compilation and static analysis
This is a great idea for popular dynamic languages with existing users and codebases, particularly the focus on "subset" to limit the scope and emphasizing that full backward compatibility is not a goal; and allowing for gradual, incremental adoption. That makes it a lot more practical to implement and adopt.
I think we'll see more of this. Recent examples include strictly typed TypeScript subset designed for ahead-of-time compilation.