Sufficiently Small

After a long haul, and diversions into other more important projects — including starting a family — OWL BASIC today produced its first executable. Its not much. In fact its hardly anything. Just 2048 bytes of Windows PE executable containing the global variable declarations from Acornsoft’s 1982 Sphinx Adventure. Each file of BASIC source [...]

Europython 2009 was my first Python conference, this being the first year that I’ve been able to use Python professionally for application development. We’d made a decision that if we were to be using Python commercially, we should be active within the Python community, so two of our team travelled from Norway to Birmingham, UK. [...]

Jython and IronPython run on platforms where strings are unicode capable by default. Both implementations have chosen to make str essentially an alias for unicode in Python source code. The bytes type, introduced in PEP358 as part of transition to fully unicode Python 3.0, is unambiguously a sequence of single byte values. We can see [...]

Earlier today I posted the second article in what is turning out to be a short series in the investigation into why the performance of IronPython is around 100× slower than CPython, when running the front-end of my OWL BASIC compiler.
The most informative comment was from Curt Hagenlocher who works on IronPython in the Visual [...]

IronPython 2.0 can be hundreds of times slower than CPython on some microbenchmarks. Jython 2.5 can scale better than CPython on those same benchmarks.

IronPython can be slow – 10x to 100x slower than CPython on real-world code and it has been observed to be up to 6000x slower.

…higher-order techniques can be used to aid user-interface programming with Swing…

… why do programmers continue to subject themselved to working in C++ … ?