This is targeting a Python subset, not Python itself.
For example, something as simple as this will not compile, because lists cannot mix types in Codon (https://docs.exaloop.io/codon/language/collections#strong-ty...):
l = [1, 's']
It's confusing to call this a "Python compiler" when the constraints it imposes pretty fundamentally change the nature of the language.> Dictionaries: Codon's dictionary type does not preserve insertion order, unlike Python's as of 3.6.
That's a gratuitous break. Nothing about preserving insertion order interferes with compilation, AOT or otherwise. The authors of Codon broke dict ordering because they felt like it, not because they had to.
At least Mojo merely claims to be Python-like. Unlike Codon, it doesn't claim to be Python then note in the fine print that it doesn't uphold Python contractual language semantics.
Obviously they didn’t do that. There are trade-offs when preserving dictionary ordering.
> Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings.
That rules out almost anything web-ish for me.
The use case I could imagine is places where you have a bunch of python programmers who don't really want to learn another language but you have modest amounts of very speed-sensitive work.
E.g., you're a financial trading company who has hired a lot of PhDs with data science experience. In that context, I could imagine saying, "Ok, quants, all of your production code has to work in Codon". It's not like they're programming masters anyhow, and having it be pretty Python-ish will be good enough for them.
Yikes. These days I wouldn't even call those strings, just bytes. I can live with static/strong typing (I prefer it, even), but not having support for actual strings is a huge blow.
That makes sense as a sales pitch. "Hey, company with a lot of money! Want your nerds to go faster and need less expensive hardware? Pay us for magic speed-ups!" So it's less a product for programmers than it is for executives.
type Json = None | bool | float | str | dict[str, Json] | list[Json]
you might have similar situations for configs e.g. float | str for time in seconds or a human readable time string like "30s" etc.
given how fundamental such things are I'm not sure if there will be any larger projects (especially wrt. web servers and similar) which are compatible with this
also many commonly used features for libraries/classes etc. are not very likely to work (but idk. for sure, they just are very dynamic in nature)
so IMHO this seems to be more like a python-like language you can use for idk. some since computations and similar then a general purpose faster python
Each node has a list of children, and the element type is `str|HtmlNode`. I find this vastly easier to use than the LXML ETree api, where nodes have `text` and `tail` attributes to represent interleaved text.
Interestingly, the LXML docs promote their design as follows: > he two properties .text and .tail are enough to represent any text content in an XML document. This way, the ElementTree API does not require any special text nodes in addition to the Element class, that tend to get in the way fairly often (as you might know from classic DOM APIs). https://lxml.de/tutorial.html#elements-contain-text
It could be a simple matter of taste! But I suspect that the difference between what they are describing as "classic DOM" vs what I am doing is that they are referring to experience with C/C++/Java libraries circa 2009 that had much less convenient dynamic type introspection. The "get in the way fairly often" reminds me of how verbose it is to deal with heterogenous data in C/C++/ObjC. In ObjC for example, you could have an array mixing NSString with other NSObject subclasses, but you had to do work to type it correctly. If you wanted numbers in there you had to use NSNumber which is an annoying box type that you never otherwise use. And ObjC was considered very dynamic in its day!
I have long felt that the root of much evil was the overbearing distinction between primitive and object types in C++/Java/Objective-C.
All of this is a long way of saying, I think "how to deal with heterogenous lists of stuff" is a huge question in language design, library design, and the daily work of programming. Modern languages have by no means converged on a single way to represent varying types of elements. If you want to create trees of stuff, at some level that is "mixing types in a list" no matter how you might try to encode it. Just food for thought!
They don't even mention the changes to `list`.
> Integers: Codon's int is a 64-bit signed integer, whereas Python's (after version 3) can be arbitrarily large. However Codon does support larger integers via Int[N] where N is the bit width.
> Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings.
> Dictionaries: Codon's dictionary type does not preserve insertion order, unlike Python's as of 3.6.
> Tuples: Since tuples compile down to structs, tuple lengths must be known at compile time, meaning you can't convert an arbitrarily-sized list to a tuple, for instance.
https://docs.exaloop.io/codon/general/differences
Pretty sure this means the following doesn't work either:
config = { "name": "John Doe", "age": 32 }
Note: It looks like you can get around this via Python interop, but that further supports the point that this isn't really Python.I hope it is released under a truly open-source license in the future; this seems like a promising technology. I'm also wondering how it would match C++ performance if it is still garbage collected.
The Business Source License (BSL) 1.1 is a software license created by MariaDB Corporation. It's designed as a middle ground between fully open-source licenses and traditional proprietary software licenses. It's kind of neat because it's a parameteric license, in that you can change some parameters while leaving the text of the license unchanged.
For codon, the "Change Date" is 2028-03-01 and the "Change License" is "Apache License, Version 2.0", meaning that the license will change to Apache2 in March of 2028. Until then, I guess you need to make a deal with Exaloop to use codon in production.
[1] https://github.com/exaloop/codon?tab=License-1-ov-file#readm...
I can say one thing - Shedskin compiles to C++, which was very compelling to me for integrating into existing C++ products. Actually another thing too, Shedskin is Open Source under GPLv3. (Like GCC.)
It’s not surprising that you can make a static compiler that makes tiny little programs written in a dynamic language into fast executables.
The hard part is making that scale to >=10,000 LoC programs. I dunno which static reasoning approaches codon uses, but all the ones I’m familiar with fall apart when you try to scale to large code.
That’s why JS benchmarking focused on larger and larger programs over time. Even the small programs that JS JIT writers use tend to have a lot of subtle idioms that break static reasoning, to model what happens in larger programs.
If you want to get in the business of making dynamic languages fast then the best advice I can give you is don’t use any of the benchmarks that these folks cite for your perf tuning. If you really do have to start with small programs then something like Richards or deltablue are ok, but you’ll want to diversify to larger programs if you really want to keep it real.
(Source: I was a combatant in the JS perf wars for a decade as a webkitten.)
Any relation? Any comparisons?
Funny I can't find the license for graalvm python in their docs [2]. That could be a differentiator.
- [1] GraalVM Python on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41570708
- [2] GraalVM Python site https://www.graalvm.org/python/
- [3] HN Dec 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33908576
https://ep2024.europython.eu/session/spy-static-python-lang-...
https://ep2024.europython.eu/session/how-to-build-a-python-t...
(The talks were fantastic but they have yet to upload the recordings to YouTube.)
But it's anyway maybe an interesting comparison to Codon.
They note the following [0]:
> The GPU module is under active development. APIs and semantics might change between Codon releases.
The thing is, based on the current syntax and semantics I see, it’ll almost certainly need to change to support non-NVIDIA devices, so I think it might be a better idea to just go with WebGPU compute pipelines sooner rather than later.
Just my two pennies…
[0]: https://docs.exaloop.io/codon/advanced/gpu
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/webgpu
[2]: https://wgpu.rs
WebGPU while stating compute is within their design I would imagine is focused on presentation/rendering and probably not on large demanding workloads.
> Strings: Codon currently uses ASCII strings unlike Python's unicode strings.
That seems really odd to me. Who would use a framework nowadays that doesn't support unicode?
From a quick glance this seems to genuinely translate into native execution.
[1] https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/src/tutorial/embeddi...
numba, cython, pypy...