luajit-remake VS Nuitka

It's really cool that Haoran Xu copy-and-patch technique is catching on, I remember discovering it through his blog posts on applying these techniques to his own LuaJIT remake project[0][1] (and I probably found those through a post here). I highly recommend them if you're into that sort of thing, BTW. They're incredible deep dives, but he uses the details-element to keep the metaphorical descents into Mariana Trench optional so it doesn't get too overwhelming.

I even had the privilege of congratulating him the 1000th star of the GH repo[2], where he reassured me and others that he's still working on it despite the long pause after the last blog post, and that this mainly has to do with behind-the-scenes rewrites that make no sense to publish in part.

[0] https://sillycross.github.io/2022/11/22/2022-11-22/

[1] https://sillycross.github.io/2023/05/12/2023-05-12/

[2] https://github.com/luajit-remake/luajit-remake/issues/11

This seems like an awesome way of writing faster interpreters – i.e. not in assembly, but in C++ snippets you stitch together with a tool.

I did peek at the deegen tool a bit, and it seems quite large? https://github.com/luajit-remake/luajit-remake/tree/master/d...

I would be interested in an overview of all the analysis it has to do, which as I understand is basically “automated Mike Pall”

FWIW I think this is the hand-written equivalent with LuaJIT’s dynasm tool: https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/blob/v2.1/src/vm_x64.dasc (just under 5000 lines)

Also there are several of these files with no apparent sharing, as you would get with deegen:

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/blob/v2.1/src/vm_x86.dasc

https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT/blob/v2.1/src/vm_ppc.dasc

Thanks for the feedback! I'm Syrus, main author of the work on py2wasm.

We already opened a PR into Nuitka to bring the relevant changes upstream: https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka/pull/2814

We envision py2wasm being a thin layer on top of Nuitka, as also commented in the article.

From what we gathered, we believe that there's usefulness on having py2wasm as a separate package, as py2wasm would also need to ship the precompiled Python distribution (3.11) for WASI (which will not be needed for the other Nuitka use cases), apart of also shipping other tools that are not directly relevant for Nuitka

This is a good place to mention https://nuitka.net/ which aims to compile python programs into standalone binaries.

For Python, you could make a proper deployment binary using Nuitka (in standalone mode – avoid onefile mode for this). I'm not pretending it's as easy as building a Go executable: you may have to do some manual hacking for more unusual unusual packages, and I don't think you can cross compile. I think a key element you're getting at is that Go executables have very few dependencies on OS packages, but with Python (once you've sorted the actual Python dependencies) you only need the packages used for manylinux [2], which is not too onerous.

[1] https://nuitka.net/

[2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0599/#the-manylinux2014-policy

glee is rich in blogging features but has some drawbacks. One of the main drawbacks is its compatibility with multiple operating systems and system architectures. We lost one potential customer due to glee incompatibility in macOS. Another major issue is the deployment time. We built the first version of glee entirely in Python and used nuitka, nuitka compiles Python programs into a single executable binary file. We need to create three separate stages for creating executable binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux in deployment, and it takes around 20 minutes to complete.

There is already an AOT compiler for Python: Nuitka[0]. But I don't think it's much faster.

And then there is mypyc[1] which uses mypy's static type annotations but is only slightly faster.

And various other compilers like Numba and Cython that work with specialized dialects of Python to achieve better results, but then it's not quite Python anymore.

[0] https://nuitka.net/

[1] https://github.com/python/mypy/tree/master/mypyc

Nuitka deals pretty well with those in general: https://nuitka.net/

Hi HN,

Has anyone explored Nuitka [1] and developed understanding from a blank slate?

Is there any toy version of this, so that one can start playing with the language translation concepts?

Is there any underlying theory/inspiration upon which this project is built?

Are there any similar projects, in say other languages?

[1] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

That's more of cultural problem in the Python community.

If I provide an end user software to my client written an Python (so not a backend, not a lib...), I will compile it with nuitka (https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka) and hide the stack trace (https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-and-how-to-hide-the-python-st...) to provide a stand alone executable.

This means the users don't have to know it's made with Python or install anything, and it just works.

However, Python is not like Go or Rust, and providing such an installer requires more than work, so a huge part of the user base (which have a lot of non professional coders) don't have the skill, time or resources to do it.

And few people make the promotion of it.

I should write an article on that because really, nobody wants to setup python just to use a tool.

As for a simpler option, you could use a "compiler": https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka