Google searches for holy grail of Python performance - Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/google-launches-project-to-boost-python-performance-by-5x.ars

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow that seeks to improve the performance of the Python programming language. One of the project's goals is to replace the Python virtual machine with an LLVM-based JIT.

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster. The project is being implemented as a branch of the conventional CPython runtime and will be fully source-compatible with regular Python applications and native extensions. This will make it possible to eventually merge the improvements into Python trunk. The goal of the Unladen Swallow project is to use LLVM, the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure, to build a just-in-time (JIT) compilation engine that can replace Python's own specialized virtual machine. This approach offers a number of significant advantages. As the developers describe in the project plan, the project will make it possible to transition Python to a register-based virtual machine and will pave the way for future optimizations. Adopting LLVM could also potentially open the door for more seamlessly integr

Google's Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow, which aims to bring a major performance boost to the Python programming language by making runtime speed five times faster.

Où l'on voit apparaître le verbe "to desugar"

"If you follow this article, you should end up with a language that can define functions, call functions, define variables, assign data to variables and perform basic math operations. It will support two basic types, doubles and integers. Some of the functionality is unimplemented, so you can have the satisfaction of actually implementing some of this stuff yourself and get the hang of writing a compiler with a little help."

Tutorial for writing your own compiler

<GeDaMo> Use mmap rather than malloc if you want memory with nx disabled: http://androidbutnotparanoid.blogspot.com/2009/05/dynamically-generating-and-executing.html

Computer programs can generate machine code in memory and then execute it. This is the case with Sun's Java Hotspot VM, which dynamically compiles Java bytecode to native code to increase the VM's performance. Several exploits are based on buffer overflows to remotely inject machine code into memory and then jumping into it. Google released it's Chrome web browser featuring the V8 Javascript Engine, which greatly improved Javascript's performance by compiling Javascript to native code.