To satisfy some sick curiosity of mine, I decided to write a miniature version of python in less than 64k of code. The code includes a tokenizer (which works rather well) a parser (which sort of works ) a translator (which does the job). All of those bits are written in python. The last bit is the C library I wrote to handle all the grit. That part isn’t so good.

To sum up, my implementation does very little, and what it does, it does very slowly. Most of the speed is spent up in memory allocation (my best guess). I wish I had a julia screenshot to show you, but I don’t think I have the patience, nor the RAM, to provide you with the pleasure.

If you wish to witness the horrors, feel free to check out svn://www.imitationpickles.org/tinypy/trunk … Please don’t look too closely. I think if I really want to work on this sort of stuff my time would be better spent either:

• Learning the python C API or ctypes so I can do stuff without SWIG. (I’ve liked SWIG, but all the magic makes me nervous.)
• Contribute to shed-skin, and add some features I’d like to it
• Contribute to PyPy-Rpython, and add some features I’d like to it
• Wait for py3k, where hopefully someone will write some magic code that uses the swell function annotation features to make fast things happen.

Of my options, learning the C-Python API (or maybe ctypes) is probably the easiest answer - I’d get all the fun of python, and I’d get my C speed. Between working on shed-skin and PyPy — my feeling is that I really wish shed-skin generated C code or that PyPy-Rpython wasn’t so huge and scary. All that said, I’ll probably just wait for py3k and hope

*today is opposite day!