Emscripten is an LLVM-to-JavaScript transpiler.
Is there any way the two of those could be hooked up?
I mean, you're not going to be using tkinter or running Python networking modules on the browser, anyway. If you could compile some of the scientific and numeric Python that exists into JS, it would allow a lot of scientific computing to be distributed and run on the web, client-side, including most of the machine learning and NLP code that exists now in Python.
From just an hour of research, it doesn't look like it would be very hard. But I only know enough about the two projects to be dangerous.
At the very least, it's an interesting idea.
EDIT: TO clarify, I'm referring to "distributed" as in distribute an asset (in this case a JS script) to a computer to be run, not distribute a work load.
Anyone figured out how to get a comparable benchmark out of it without loading a full browser?
The reason I ask is that http://repl.it/languages/Python loads quickly and can actually run in my iPhone 4S Mobile Safari. At 139 MB uncompressed currently, I'm not sure this new project will ever result in something that would let me write python code natively in a <script>. I know that he's currently running with node.js, so no browser required, but if this project is only ever going to be yet another desktop/server interpreter, I would be gobsmacked if it could remotely approach PyPy or CPython performance - even once they get JIT going.
The article involves compilation of the PyPy interpreter (not CPython) into JS.
This is why I asked about someone attempting a benchmark comparison between the two.
Still, it's a fun project. Good luck to the author.
EDIT: If this seems too mind-bending, think that even machine code is not really machine code: the CPU actually JITs the "native" code (say, in the x86-64 ISA) into a "more native" code that is what is actually executed by the CPU (for Intel CPUs, these are "micro-ops"), and in doing that it uses a lot of compilation tricks (such as trace caches), including optimizations driven by runtime feedback (you can think of branch prediction this way).
Of course Javascript is a much thicker abstraction, but conceptually it is not much dissimilar.
Also, asm.js code is structured in a way that makes it obvious the code will not change over time (it's in a closure, where functions cannot be modified), again, in order to make optimizing large projects easier. When JITing however you do want to add new code all the time.
But this could work great without generating asm.js code. The VM itself is C code that can be compiled wholesale into asm.js (when the Lua VM was compiled that way it was quite fast, about 50% of native speed), and it would then JIT at runtime normal JS and call into that.
If the CPython API is so easy to get going on emscripten I wonder if anyone has tried using emscripten to compile Nuitka (http://nuitka.net/) output to Asm.js yet?
No reason this approach cannot JIT into JS just like clojurescript and dart.
Without the type system however, Python in the browser is next to useless in practice.
1. I think you meant "of".
2. log(781250 / 877) is closer to 3 than 2.
In a comment, I found out about another project ShedSkin which seems to be like RPython, i.e. it compiles a subset of Python to C++. https://code.google.com/p/shedskin/ http://shed-skin.blogspot.de/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6091123
(This may have been tried in the past; in the post "10 years of PyPy" it's mentioned that there was once a JavaScript backend but it was removed because it was a horrible idea: http://morepypy.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/10-years-of-pypy.htm...)
[1] https://github.com/sq/JSIL/wiki/JavaScript-Performance-For-M... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=885526
lua.vm.js is running at 50% of Lua, not LuaJIT. Add to that that you can't touch the DOM from asm, and the ported VM basically has it's own heap and no way to collect cycles between Lua and JS and it's not a good solution. Much better to rely on the JS VM for memory management.
