Simon Willison’s Weblog

Python 3.13 gets a JIT. “In late December 2023 (Christmas Day to be precise), CPython core developer Brandt Bucher submitted a little pull-request to the Python 3.13 branch adding a JIT compiler.”

Anthony Shaw does a deep dive into this new experimental JIT, explaining how it differs from other JITs. It’s an implementation of a copy-and-patch JIT, an idea that only emerged in 2021. This makes it architecturally much simpler than a traditional JIT, allowing it to compile faster and take advantage of existing LLVM tools on different architectures.

So far it’s providing a 2-9% performance improvement, but the real impact will be from the many future optimizations it enables. # 9th January 2024, 9:25 pm

Cyber (via) “Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting.” Lots of interesting ideas in here, but the one that really caught my eye is that its designed to be easily embedded into other languages and “will allow the host to insert gas mileage checks in user scripts. This allows the host to control how long a script can run”—my dream feature for implementing a safe, sandboxed extension mechanism! Cyber is implemented using Zig and LLVM. # 28th January 2023, 4:25 am

Mapping Python to LLVM (via) Codon is a fascinating new entry in the “compile Python code to something else” world—this time targeting LLVM. Ariya Shajii describes in great detail how it pulls this off, including tricks such as transforming Python generators to LLVM coroutines. Codon doesn’t promise that all Python code will work—it’s best thought of as a Python-like language which can be used to create compiled modules which can then be imported back into regular Python projects. # 10th January 2023, 2:08 am

Developing for the Apple iPhone using Flash. A brilliant feat of engineering: Adobe worked around Apple’s “no runtime allowed” rules by writing a compiler front end for LLVM that compiles ActionScript 3 to ARM assembly code, and apparently ported the regular Flash drawing APIs as well. # 5th October 2009, 9:15 pm

ProjectPlan—unladen-swallow. A branch of Python 2.6 aiming to radically improve performance (the target is a 5x improvement), by compiling Python to machine code using LLVM’s JIT engine. I think this is a Google 20% time project (or maybe not, see the comments). An early version without LLVM is already available for download. # 30th March 2009, 10:09 am