Python on Javascript VMs (such as V8)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

[folks, my apologies for the double-post via comp.lang.python whilst
my tiny brain works backwards and notices - eventually - that
comp.lang.python is mirrored from python-list duh]

On Sep 3, 10:02 pm, [e-mail] wrote:

Berco Beute:

I wonder what it would take to implement Python in JavaScript so it

1200 lines of code for the compiler, and about... 800 for a basic
suite of builtin types (Dict, List, set, string).

http://pyjamas.sf.net

so it's been done.

can run on those fancy new JavaScript VM's such as Chrome's V8 or

that's been done, too.

http://advogato.org/article/985.html

Firefox' tracemonkey. Much the same as Python implementations in C#
(IronPython) and Java (Jython). It would certainly bring back the fun
in web application development.

it's great :) been using it just for fun, for about 18 months.
http://lkcl.net/site_code
and for a personal project
http://partyliveonline.com
and for a commercial project which i'm sorry i can't refer you to the
development site right now.

Is there anything done in that direction?

yup. quite a lot.
see http://groups.google.com/groups/pyjamas-dev

The mythical beast pypy is supposed able to translate Python to
Javascript too, I think. From some of my benchmarks Chrome's V8 is a
little slower than Psyco... so the matter is how much efficiently can
be Python translated in JS.

well, the llpamies pyjamas branch from sep 2007 has some definite
improvements in the _features_ provided (python-wise) but some time
after that, one too many interoperability features were added (proper
support for **kwargs) and it just... blew up, got too complicated for
luiz and he abandoned the effort.

i've outlined on pyjamas-dev what work needs to be done to satisfy
both goals of remaining efficient and also providing support for
**kwargs.

one _much_ more important requirement - over-and-above
"efficiency" (which isn't that bad anyway in pyjs.py) is readability.

remember you have to _debug_ these xxxxing programs .... in
javascript, not python (which is why i did pyjamas-desktop - http://pyjd.sf.net
so you could keep on using the standard python interpreter and _then_
run the same app through pyjs.py to convert it to javascript).

l.