Comment by mpweiher
13 hours ago
Looks very interesting!
I remember chatting with one of the creators of PyPy (not the author of TFA) a number of years ago at HPI. He had just given a talk about how RPython was used in PyPy development, and I was fascinated.
To me, it seemed completely obvious that RPython itself seemed like a really interesting standalone language, but he would have none of it.
Whenever I suggested that RPython might have advantages over PyPy he insisted that PyPy was better and, more strangely, just as fast. Which was sort of puzzling, because the reason given for RPython was speed. When I then suggested that they could (after bootstrap) just use PyPy without the need for RPython, he insisted that PyPy was too slow for that to be feasible.
The fact that both of these statements could not really be true at the same time did not register.
I have asked about using RPython as a generic standalone language before. I think the official statement is that is was never intended to become one, and it's really a very minimal subset of Python (so basically no existing Python code will run, it would require heavy refactoring or complete rewrite), and it's only specifically those features that they currently need, and it might also be a moving target, and they don't want to give certain guarantees on stability of the language etc.
Once you consider that you anyway need to write very different kind of code for RPython, then maybe just using Nim or some other language is a better idea?
A general purpose language should be suitable to writing its own compiler. If it's to slow for that, what's the point?
I'm not quite seeing the contradiction either? I sort of get that you're pointing out some kind of tension, but it's not obvious that there's a contradiction. The statements involved don't seem to be interpretable in a self-contained way.
I had understood that the only reason for RPython's existence was that bootstrapping was (or at least seemed) impossible without it... ? Although I didn't dig into that claim, either.