[LLVMdev] OT: Python on LLVM

[Collin Winter]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Paul Melis <llvm at assumetheposition.nl> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Slightly off-topic (as it's not directly about using or developing LLVM):
>
> http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan
>
> "Our long-term proposal is to replace CPython's custom virtual machine
> with a JIT built on top of LLVM, while leaving the rest of the Python
> runtime relatively intact."
>
> Just curious, has anyone here heard more about this project?

You found it just as I was typing an introduction email :) I'm the
tech lead for Unladen Swallow, and we just announced our plans
yesterday at the PyCon VM summit. Our intention is to replace
CPython's eval loop with a JIT based on LLVM. We're still fairly
early-on in our work, focused on just getting a basic, slow
implementation working on top of LLVM. We'll start making it fast in
Q3 and beyond. I'm sure we'll be back with lots of questions, and
hopefully contributions :)

Our mailing list is unladen-swallow at googlegroups.com, and we're happy
to answer any questions about our project plan on that list.

> P.S. If I'd heard about this just 6 days later (e.g. Aprils Fools) I
> wouldn't have believed it, especially with that project name. There's just
> something weird about suddenly finding a project that's obviously been
> going on for some time (the roadmap is very detailed and they have initial
> working code), while I spend quite some time on Python and LLVM related
> lists and never saw a reference to it.

We didn't want to announce when all we had was vapor. Our 2009Q1
release is a collection of tweaks to CPython (to give a quick
performance boost to existing applications), and we've just now begun
on the LLVM work. We still have a long way to go.

Collin Winter