Hacker News
points by Dylan16807 1 day ago | 0 comments
If you're saying V8 is quite fast why did you say the world is "waiting for a counterexample" to JITs on very dynamic objects being slow?

When OP wrote "inline Cython" they didn't seem focused on numerics, they talked about "proper C speed", and they mentioned modifying the language. I don't think it's getting off-topic to suggest a deeper integration that lets the JIT be very intimate with the interpreter and truly inline things in a way that bypasses language-crossing and type-dispatching overhead. As long as you're in the hot path, let it look up object fields in a couple instructions.

[–] ajross 1 day ago
> When OP wrote "inline Cython" they didn't seem focused on numerics, they talked about "proper C speed"

Isn't that basically what I said? Lua isn't "proper C speed", nor is PyPy, the cancelled Python JIT in question, nor even V8. That's a different problem area with different technologies. The fact that you like coding backend stuff in Lua or whatever isn't really saying much about whether numba is great.

But it is. Numba is great.

[–] strenholme 1 day ago
I agree Numba is great. The reason I stay clear of Python is because the Python2 → Python3 transition burned me; the bureaucrats at Debian decided that, since my open source project had one Python2 script in it I wrote many years ago, I had to update my code to make that script a Python3 script. A very toxic and arrogant attitude; old versions of languages should not be killed like that when there is so much code written in the language, and when it can be very difficult [1] to convert a script from Python2 to Python3.

Lua5.1 is much more stable by the virtue that the only updates it code gets are very minor changes to fix any lingering security issues it has (the last Lua5.1 CVE is from 2014).

[1] I guess these days a LLM can do the grunt work of converting a Python2 script to Python3.

[2] There is a project which converts Lua in to native code: https://github.com/samyeyo/clx

[–] Dylan16807 1 day ago
V8 gets a hell of a lot closer than this experimental JIT. Numba speed for number crunching and V8 speed for non-number-crunching would satisfy OP, I think.

Numba is great at its niche. But OP directly said Numba is "not really" what they were looking for because it's so narrow.