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The following is a performance comparison of several (pure) Python implementations, for a large part of the Shed Skin example set . I left out some of the examples, that would result in an unfair comparison (mostly because of randomization), or that were too interactive to easily measure. Obviously this comparison is very biased, and probably unfair in some way to the other projects (though I've…
I have just released version 0.9.11 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python-to-C++ compiler. Most importantly, it adds support for Python 3.14. It also adds support for many 3.x features that were not yet implemented, in addition to basic support for the base64 module. It also optimizes a few more common code patterns. Paul Boddie was able to add support for libpcre2, and in the process updated conan to…
I have just released version 0.9.9 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python-to-C++ compiler. It comes with many changes under the hood to improve the code base. For example, Shakeeb has started adding type annotations to Shed Skin itself, whereas I have fixed many C++ compiler warnings. We have also replaced the old CPython-based dict and set implementations with STL unordered_map and unordered_set.…
For the longest time, I've wanted to re-implement the original DOOM engine in Python, and compile it with Shedskin to get reasonable performance. So when I finally ran across a pretty small engine written in Java , by Leonardo Ono, I decided to convert his version to Python. I left out some optimizations (most notably "visplanes"), for readability and in order to keep everything under 1000 lines…
I recently decided to sit down and finally port Shed Skin , an experimental restricted-Python-to-C++ compiler in the works since 2005 or so, to Python3. Three painful months and a total diff of 50k lines later, everything now works with Python3 (Shed Skin itself, and all tests and examples..) This does not mean that every Python3 feature is supported, but what was there now at least works fine…
I have just released Shed Skin 0.9.4, a (restricted-)Python-(2.x)-to-C++ compiler. The full release notes can be found here , as usual. Major thanks go to Ernesto Ferro, who has been making many large refactorings in the code to improve maintainability. He also found a nice new example, called Gh0stenstein (see picture below). Paul Haeberli has also triggered several very useful improvements.…
I have just released version 0.9.3 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python (2.4-2.6) to C++ compiler. This is the third maintenance release since 0.9, and as such there were (almost) no major changes. For the full list of changes since 0.9.2, please see the release notes . Five interesting new examples were added for this release, bringing the total to 72. Most interesting to me are Pygasus, a 1,500…
I have just released version 0.9.2 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python (2.4-2.6) to C++ compiler. This is the second maintenance release since 0.9, so no new major features were added. The biggest improvement is probably some optimizations for the array module. Other than this, the changes are mostly unrelated minor optimizations and bug fixes. Please see the release notes for more detail. Three…
I have just released version 0.9.1 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python (2.4-2.6) to C++ compiler. This is a maintenance release, so no new major features were added. Most interesting perhaps are optimizations for itertools.product and str.join. Other than that, it's mostly bugfixes and a new (hq2x image scaling) example. Please see the release notes for more details. In the meantime, Paul Boddie has…
I have just released version 0.9 of Shed Skin, a restricted-Python to C++ compiler. Looking at the state of things, a 1.0 version is probably not far off. There will probably be several 0.9.x releases first, though. There were two issues blocking a 1.0 release in my mind, both of which seem to have been fixed with this release. First, I was not completely happy yet with the type inference…
I'm happy to announce the release of Shed Skin 0.8, a (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler. It must be one of the best releases so far, with help and feedback from many directions. I'm especially thrilled to see an updated version of the C64 emulator example run one of my all-time favorite games.. :-) The emulator is now well over 3,000 lines (sloccount), and still compiling fine every time. The…
I have just uploaded the tarball for Shed Skin 0.7.1, which fixes several important problems in 0.7, and adds a few minor features. The Windows version and hopefully the Debian/Fedora packages will follow shortly. As usual, please see the release notes for an overview of all the changes. There aren't any major new features, because I haven't received much feedback since 0.7. Please let me know if…
I have just released version 0.7 of Shed Skin , a (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. The new version comes with lots of minor fixes and some optimizations , as well as a new Windows package. The Windows package was upgraded to a recent version of MinGW , which means it now includes GCC 4.5. I hope to package each new release for Windows again from now on. There are also two nice new examples,…
I have just released version 0.6 of Shedskin , an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler. Most importantly, this release finally comes with a substantial scalability improvement. Instead of analyzing a whole program at once, Shedskin now repeatedly analyzes an ever increasing version of the program, starting at nothing, essentially, until the whole program is analyzed. It turns out it…
I have just released Shed Skin 0.5, an optimizing (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. Looking back at the release notes, I'm happy to see contributions from more people than ever. I'd also like to thank David Ripton again, for sending me his Project Euler solutions (see my previous post), and Jason Ye, for sending in so many issues. The new release supports 64-bit integers (shedskin -l), which…
(Shedskin is an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler.) After releasing 0.4 I received a link to a blog post comparing PyPy, Unladen Swallow and Psyco for a set of over 100 project euler solutions. Of course, I decided to ask the author for the source code of these solutions, to have a go with Shedskin. It turned out to be a great test set for spotting performance flaws, and it even…
I have just released Shed Skin 0.4, an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler. Thanks again especially to Jeremie Roquet for helping out. The biggest 'improvement' of this release is perhaps that Windows is no longer supported. Windows users are encouraged to take over maintainership of the MinGW version, or to upgrade to a 'real' operating system, such as Ubuntu , and live in software…
After 5 years of work, I'm proud to announce Shed Skin 0.3, an experimental (but obviously restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. Looking over the release notes , I'm convinced this must be the best release so far. I would like to thank especially Jeremie Roquet, for several major contributions to this release, and Thomas Spura, for reorganizing the codebase. Joris van Rantwijk provided the great new…
(Shed Skin is an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler.) After playing with Disco for a while, and after that being away for over a month, I'm ready to put some time in Shed Skin again. I've just applied a few patches that I received (thanks!!), fixed some minor issues myself and added a few optimizations. But I'm not really sure which 'big' thing to work on next, and I don't really…
after receiving generous help from 'apt1002' in the datastructure department, I am happy to announce Disco 0.3 (see my previous posting about Disco). the new version is about ten times faster than 0.2 (from around 600 games per second on my PC to about 6000). in addition it now checks for positional superko (repeated positions), so it can now play on CGOS without making illegal moves half of the…
I have just released version 0.2 of Shed Skin, an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. It comes with 7 new example programs (for a total of 40 example programs, at over 12,000 lines) and several important improvements/bug fixes. See here for the full changelog. The new example programs consist of Disco, an elegant go player (see my previous blog post ), a larger Voronoi implementation…
There's this shiny new technique to implement computer Go players, called Monte Carlo UCT . It shocked the Go world by powering the first computer player (Mogo) to beat (quite unexpectedly I think) a professional player in an official match (with only a 7 stone handicap). Ever since hearing about this rather simple new technique, my hands have been itching to implement it in Python and compile the…
I have just released version 0.1.1 of Shed Skin, an experimental (restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. It comes with 5 new example programs (for a total of 35 example programs, at over 10,000 lines) and several important improvements/bug fixes. See here for the full changelog. The most interesting new example is minilight , an elegant raytracer (more precisely, a global illumination renderer) that…
(Shed Skin is an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler.) Minilight is an elegant minimal global illumination renderer, or raytracer, that uses triangle primitives and an octree spatial index. The original version consists of about 1,000 lines of C++, but there are several translations available at the homepage, such as ~500 line OCaml and Python versions. The Python version apparently…
(Shed Skin is an experimental (restricted-)Python-to-C++ compiler.) After several years of development and thirty releases, I have finally released Shed Skin 0.1. While still experimental, all the basic pieces are now in place: -type inference that works for many smallish programs -support for a useful subset of Python -support for a good subset of the standard libraries (about 17 modules, such as…