Re: future Python evolution

[Paul Eggert]

On 2024-04-21 15:38, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> > > But the concepts of the shell are stuck in the 40-years-ago past.
> >
> > True, but keeping things simple allows for optimizations like PaSH that
> > can't reasonably be done to Python.
> >
> > https://binpa.sh/
>
> Well, I did try PaSh on gnulib-tool — this issue [1] is a testimony.

I agree that PaSh is not ready to tackle 'configure' scripts yet. 
However, it's promising and I wouldn't expect similar promise from 
Python script acceleration.

A better way to exploit PaSh would be to modify Autoconf to use it 
effectively. This of course would be nontrivial, though it shouldn't be 
*that* hard.


> But what can you expect from a parallelization approach? On, say, a
> quad-core processor you can expect at most a 4x speedup.

Quad-core is not the wave of the future. Even the three-year-old (and 
now discontinued) Xeon W-1350 I'm typing this on (which was trailing 
edge and bottom of the line when it came out - hey, I'm a cheapskate!) 
is 6 cores and 12 threads. And if you've been following recent CPU news 
you're aware of the big core counts coming down the pipeline. We should 
be engineering for these future systems, and not worry too much about 
yesterday's quad-core CPUs.

And if one can't get a decent single node to develop on, there's always 
DiSh on the horizon....

https://github.com/binpash/dish