| From: | Marc Culler |
| Date: | 20 Aug 2000 at 21:43:47 |
| Subject: | AMIOPEN: Amiga python |
I think that python will make an ideal replacement for ARexx on the
new Amiga. Python's object-oriented style is a good match for the
object-based programming on the Amiga. Python allows easy importation
of modules written in C. Using this facility it is straightforward to
make virtually any C library accessible from python scripts. Such
interfaces exist for graphics libraries (OpenGL/Mesa), scientific
computation packages (LAPACK, FFTPACK), databases (PostgreSQL) and GUI
toolkits (Tk). I believe that this importation facility can be easily
adapted to allow easy importation of arebitrary Amiga class tools. I
also believe that it will not be difficult to write an inter-process
messaging module for python similar to the one that was added to REXX
to create ARexx.
I have ported Python 1.6b1 to the new Amiga. I will post the port as
soon as it passes the python test suite. At this point it fails only
two tests. One of these failures is caused by a bug in the
/lib/strftime tool, which I will report in a following message.
The other failure, which has not been diagnosed yet, occurs in the
new regular expression module written by Secret Labs AB.
Two things were slightly disappointing to me about this port. First,
my python.00 executable is 551388 bytes, versus 319980 for the
stripped linux executable. (The linux executable is version 1.5, and
the Amiga version is 1.6, but I am pretty sure that the VP executable
will be somewhat larger than the linux native version of the same
program.) I had hoped that VP code would turn out to be more compact
than Intel machine language. Second is that the VP version is
somewhat slower. My Amiga SDK benchmarks at 3360.77 pystones/second,
while the host linux system benchmarks at 5076.14 pystones/second.
- Marc Culler
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