On 04/23/2012 08:17 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Dimitri Tcaciuc<dtcac...@gmail.com> wrote:
I may be misuderstanding the intent here, but here it goes.
If the main idea is to be able to call functions that are written in
Julia or other languages, I think an effort to create an LLVM backend
for Cython would go a long way towards inter-language connections as
the one discussed here. It should be possible to take Cython- and
Julia- produced LLVM bytecode and assemble it all together, applying
whatever bytecode optimizers that are available (eg. SSE
vectorization). A big advantage of that approach is that there's no
need for one language to know syntax conventions of the other one (or
at least not to full extent). Continuing the effort, it should be
possible to eliminate the need for writing an intermediate .c/.cpp
file if Clang compiler is used, which is also LLVM based.
You'd still need some way to translate between the Cython and Julia
calling conventions, runtimes, error handling, garbage collection
regimes, etc. IIUC, LLVM IR isn't like the CLR -- it doesn't force
languages into a common system for these things.
Which might be great and worth the effort, I don't know, and don't
want to discourage anyone. But there are literally hundreds of new
languages designed every year, and a new *successful* language comes
along maybe twice in a decade? And one of those recent ones was PHP,
which shows you how important pure technical quality is in determining
which ones survive (i.e., not much). Building a self-sustaining
ecosystem requires a ton of work and a ton of luck. And here I'm still
trying to *reduce* the number of languages I need in each analysis
pipeline... so even though there are a number of really exciting
things about Julia, and its author seems to know what he's doing, I'm
still in wait-and-see mode.
I'm excited about Julia because it's basically what I'd *like* to
program in. My current mode of development for much stuff is Jinja2 or
Tempita used for generating C code; Julia would be a real step forward.
I recently started a thread on julia-dev, primarily to encourage them to
focus on binding to Python and use Python libraries rather than focusing
on creating their own libraries (though I wasn't that blunt). The
response is positive and I'm hopeful.
The thing is, I really hope we've moved beyond CPython in 10 years -- in
fact I'd go as far as saying that the reliance on CPython (specifically
the lack of a decent JIT) is a real danger for the survival of the
scientific Python ecosystem long-term! And I have my doubts about PyPy
too (though I'm really happy for Stefan's efforts to bring some sanity
with fixing cpyext).
If Julia gets into a mode where they bootstrap by piggy-backing on
Python's libraries, and gets that working transparently and builds a
userbase around that, the next natural step is to implement Python in
Julia, with CPython C-API compatability. Which would be great.
A very, very, very long shot of course.
Dag
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