From: Michael Geary <Mike@...>
Date: 2004-06-19T15:48:23+09:00
Subject: Re: the new great computer language shootout

> Michael Geary wrote:
> > You may be thinking of Pyrex, a Python dialect that compiles to C
> > and lets you mix C and Python data types:
> >
> >http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg/python/Pyrex/
> >
> > Pyrex is really quite nifty, especially for writing C extensions to
> > Python and for wrapping existing C libraries. You can still code
> > in Python or close to it, and let Pyrex write all the boilerplate C
> > code for you. For performance critical algorithms, if you're using
> > C types the generated code should be as fast as any other C code.

Phil Tomson wrote:
> Kind of like Rubyinline
> http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/RubyInline/

Not really. RubyInline more closely resembles (surprise!) PyInline:

http://pyinline.sourceforge.net/

These are both ports of the Perl Inline module:

http://inline.perl.org/

Each of these lets you write C code inline in a quoted string, with
automatic hookups so you can call a C method from Python/Ruby/Perl.

> Or C-Generator http://redshift.sourceforge.net/cgen/

That one is interesting, and seems to be more ambitious: a mix of Ruby and
C.

Pyrex is different from any of those: you don't write any C code at all, but
do everything in Python (or near-Python) code which Pyrex compiles into C.
The Python code can use native C types, in which case it compiles into very
efficient C code.

> > Psyco, OTOH, works with standard Python code. It's essentially
> > a Just In Time compiler for Python:
> >
> >http://psyco.sourceforge.net/introduction.html

> From what I've heard, though, it doesn't let you do certian things
> that would be allowable in standard Python.

Yes, they have a few things listed on their bug page:

http://psyco.sourceforge.net/psycoguide/bugs.html#bugs

But the restrictions are pretty minor.

The nice thing about Psyco is that it doesn't require a C compiler at all,
unlike all the other solutions mentioned above.

Don't get me wrong, I like Ruby a lot. It seems to fit the way I think and
my taste in computer languages better than Python. So I'm glad to see that
Ruby is picking up these kinds of modules too.

-Mike