On Wed, 2010-01-27 at 10:25 -0800, Collin Winter wrote: > On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 7:26 AM, William Dode <w...@flibuste.net> wrote: > > I imagine that startup time and memory was also critical for V8. > > Startup time and memory usage are arguably *more* critical for a > Javascript implementation, since if you only spend a few milliseconds > executing Javascript code, but your engine takes 10-20ms to startup, > then you've lost. Also, a minimized memory profile is important if you > plan to embed your JS engine on a mobile platform, for example, or you > need to run in a heavily-multiprocessed browser on low-memory consumer > desktops and netbooks.
(as a casual reader) I'm not sure if this has been specifically mentioned before, but there are certainly multiple uses for python - and from the arguments I've seen on-list, U-S appears to mainly appeal for one of them. The three main uses I see everyday are: * simple configuration-style applications (I'm thinking of gnome configuration options etc.) * shell-script replacements * Long running processes (web apps, large desktop applications etc) (in addition, I know several people working on python applications for mobile phones) I think the performance/memory tradeoffs being discussed are fine for the long-running / server apps (20mb on a 8Gb machine is negligable) - but I think the majority of applications probably fall into the other options - extra startup time and memory usage each time you have a server monitoring script / cronjob run becomes noticeable if you have enough of them. > Among other reasons we chose LLVM, we didn't want to write code > generators for each platform we were targeting. LLVM has done this for > us. V8, on the other hand, has to implement a new code generator for > each new platform they want to target. This is non-trivial work: it > takes a long time, has a lot of finicky details, and it greatly > increases the maintenance burden on the team. I'm not involved in either, but as someone who started watching the commit list on V8, I'd thoroughly agree that it would be completely impractical for python-dev to work as the V8 team seem to. What appear minor patches very frequently have to be modified by reviewers over technicalities, and I can't imagine that level of intricate work happening efficiently without a large (funded) core team focusing on code generation. Personally, picking up the (current) python code, I was able to comfortably start modifying it within a few hours - with the V8 codebase I still haven't got a clue what's going on where, to be honest. Tim Wintle _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
