TUNES Update

[Tom Novelli]

On 3/18/07, Armin Rigo <arigo at tunes.org> wrote:
> Hi Tom,
>
> On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 12:49:37PM -0400, Tom Novelli wrote:
> > [...] Python, Ruby, Perl and Javascript [...]
> > These languages won't give up their individuality yet,
>
> And I certainly hope that they never will.

I guess we're entering the political realm now... I'll try to tread lightly....

Without competition there is no progress, that's for sure.  The
one-language concept is useful for explaining Tunes to the lay person,
but it does sound a little communistic.  The British/American
two-party political system is a better model (people who dislike the
status quo can join the other party, and a third party only becomes
viable when people abandon the first party).  Sadly the situation in
computing resembles a fragmented European democracy where there is no
clear winner, nobody really cares except for those who are part of the
mess, and nothing gets done!

> http://codespeak.net/pipermail/pypy-dev/2007q1/003607.html
>
> [The context is a discussion of static soft type inference of dynamic
> languages, which would be compiled to two versions of code ("fast" and
> "fallback"), an approach supported by LLVM guru Chris Lattner.  In that
> mail I contrast it with the very different approach that we've taken in
> the PyPy project.]
>
>
> A bientot,
>
> Armin

Ok, that gives me some projects and technical issues to look into (you
can see my list at http://tunes.org/drafts/other.html).  This is
basically the old Review project, but we're not making another list of
2000 toy languages :-)

I understand the fast/fallback approach... As for PyPy, the FAQ needs
work... let's see if I understand: You're profiling and JIT-compiling
the hot spots... The profiler tracks data types, and you just compile
native code for whatever types happen to be used most.  And this was a
new approach when you did it with Psyco, made possible by efficient
profiling techniques.  Correct?

- Tom