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Google and the Search for the Holy Grail

Mar 27, 2009

With its new project, Unladen Swallow (as in "What ... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail), Google plans to make Python faster by using LLVM to build a JIT compilation engine to replace Python's specialized virtual machine, reports Ars Technica. Thomas Mailund likes that approach, saying that JIT "has done wonders for Java," though he is more intrigued by Google's plan to do away with the global interpreter lock. "Because of global synchronisation issues, multi-threading in Python isn't quite as parallel as you might think," Mailund writes. Ars Technica adds that developers hope Unladen Swallow will allow people to use Python instead of C.

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