How the CPython compiler works

Re:How the CPython compiler works by Jasper_ on Thursday September 24, 2020 @01:10PM (#24580895)

But it's not like every tiny optimization will turn the runtime into unreadable soup. But that's been the defense every time someone proposes adding some extremely basic optimizations [0]; these things aren't difficult and any VM engineer will understand them. And even if not, it's not that that hard to learn about basic method caches. Write a few blog posts, or a giant block comment. Stuff's not arcane magic, it's the foundation of any PL implementation these days.

There are also a lot of programming language who don't bother touching Python because the team doesn't seem to care about runtime performance as their responsibility. There's a lot of excellent talent out there, and they're mostly being denied and shot down.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/

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Re:How the CPython compiler works by kstrauser on Thursday September 24, 2020 @01:33PM (#24581142)

I do agree with you on that. I think there's a happy path where you keep the high-level architecture clean and approachable, and move the tricky bits out to the edge where only a few people will have to know and care about them. That seems to work out pretty well for PostgreSQL, which on the surface is purely black magic but by all accounts is quite nice under the hood.

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