I am told and have read many times, how much better the functional languages are, such as OCaml and Haskel, but I don't understand them and don't want to go into a long learning curve.

The fundamental object oriented underpinnings give it inherent power and expressiveness in the code. Python code has such a clear and concise and readable syntax, at least for me. So, tinypy + gtkdialog + low-level-system-hacks is of interest to me.īut why Python? Why not a basic/C/something-else compiler/interpreter? Basic and C are very crude in comparison, really crude. In particular, something that I can myself hack on. It is something that I am playing with in my ongoing search for something to upgrade to from Bash coding. But, whether I do take the plunge and go for the 'full' Python, I still don't know. If you go to and look around, almost every second app is written in Python and uses PyGTK. The Rox Filer people have other apps than need Python. So many applications require Python, like Inkscape for example. I'm thinking about including the 'full' Python in Woof, as cutdown as I can get away with, because Python is so heavily used in Linux these days. Tinypy is the closest that I've found so far, remarkably small, easy to read C code.Īnswering as why I'm 'going after Python now': The developer of Wirbel, Mathias, has responded to my complaint about the executables being too big and says that the compiler does a lot of inlining, which he will look into - but that will take time.Īctually, my personal interest is to find a very easy-to-understand compiler/interpreter that I can modify, create my own extensions. I looked at shed-skin but 'hello world' was alarmingly big. Yes, a true Python compiler would be the best.

In the case of tinypy I commented that some of the functions were written in Python thus requiring runtime bytecode interpretation, which is not the most efficient. The thing is, we can get good performance out of a bytecode interpreted program, as long as all the applications and libraries that it uses are natively-compiled. Regarding tinypy, it is also a bytecode interpreter. The full Python can compile an application to bytecode, but an interpreter is still required. So, it seems to me that in theory the 'full' Python does not really have to be as big and slow as it is. In theory, it is possible to write Python modules in C or C++ and that make full use of the underlying native system shared libraries. I don't know anything about PyGTK, whether it is bloated/slow or not. Apart from the conversion delay, the size of such functions will be large and execution slow. My understanding is that a lot of Python modules are written in Python, which means they would get converted to bytecode at some point, either before or at runtime. Maybe I've misunderstood something, but I was curious as to why you're going after python now. On your blog you said you were looking for a language that wasn't interpreted and said python was, even if it is compiled. (56.2 KiB) Downloaded 1405 timesĭisciple wrote:Yes, although gtkdialog is EXTREMELY limited, and that doesn't answer the question The main problem with testing it is the lack of documentation - I will have to study the source code to find out what functions etc. So far I have only tested 'hello world' - like Wirbel, 'print' is a function, so you need brackets: I have packaged it up as '', see attached. It took a lot of messing around, but I managed to compile it statically in the uClibc rootfs - the interpreter executable is just 131KB! - that is static, totally standalone, so can reside in the initial ramdisk and will work in any Linux distro and all old versions of Puppy. Bytecode is kind of half-way between a pure source-code-interpreter and a native-code-compiler.Īnyway, the first one that I have tested is 'tinypy'. An interpreter is still within my acceptable range, as they compile to bytecode first - in fact, I think that the 'full' Python has an option to generate a bytecode file. Specifically, what I'm looking for is small size. I reported recently the problem of Wirbel generating huge executables, so I looked around at what other Python compilers/interpreters are out there.

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