Article

RPython: a step towards reconciling dynamically and statically typed OO languages

Authors:

Massimo Ancona,

Nicholas D. MatsakisAuthors Info & Claims

DLS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Dynamic languages

Pages 53 - 64

https://doi.org/10.1145/1297081.1297091

Published: 22 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Although the C-based interpreter of Python is reasonably fast, implementations on the CLI or the JVM platforms offers some advantages in terms of robustness and interoperability. Unfortunately, because the CLI and JVM are primarily designed to execute statically typed, object-oriented languages, most dynamic language implementations cannot use the native bytecodes for common operations like method calls and exception handling; as a result, they are not able to take full advantage of the power offered by the CLI and JVM.

We describe a different approach that attempts to preserve the flexibility of Python, while still allowing for efficient execution. This is achieved by limiting the use of the more dynamic features of Python to an initial, bootstrapping phase. This phase is used to construct a final RPython (Restricted Python) program that is actually executed. RPython is a proper subset of Python, is statically typed, and does not allow dynamic modification of class or method definitions; however, it can still take advantage of Python features such as mixins and first-class methods and classes.

This paper presents an overview of RPython, including its design and its translation to both CLI and JVM bytecode. We show how the bootstrapping phase can be used to implement advanced features, like extensible classes and generative programming. We also discuss what work remains before RPython is truly ready for general use, and compare the performance of RPython with that of other approaches.

References

[1]

C. S. Ananian. The static single information form. Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-801, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report, September 1999. Master's thesis.

[2]

C. Anderson, P. Giannini, and S. Drossopoulou. Towards type inference for javascript. In 19th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2005), LNCS 3586, pages 428--453. Springer, 2005.

Digital Library

[3]

G. Bracha and W. Cook. Mixin-based inheritance. In ACM Symp. on Object-Oriented Programming: Systems, Languages and Applications 1990, volume 25(10) of SIGPLAN Notices, pages 303--311. ACM Press, October 1990.

Digital Library

[4]

G. Bracha, M. Odersky, D. Stoutamire, and P.Wadler. Making the future safe for the past: adding genericity to the Java programming language. In OOPSLA '98: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, pages 183--200, New York, NY, USA, 1998. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[5]

C. Clifton, T. Millstein, G. T. Leavens, and C. Chambers. MultiJava: Design rationale, compiler implementation, and applications. ACMTrans. Prog. Lang. Syst., 28(3), May 2006.

Digital Library

[6]

B. J. Cox. Object oriented programming: an evolutionary approach. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, 1986.

Digital Library

[7]

A. Cuni, S. Pedroni, A. Chrigström, H. Krekel, G. Wesdorp, and C. F. Bolz. High-level backends and interpreter feature prototypes. Technical Report D12.1, PyPy Consortium, 2007. http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index-report.html.

[8]

S. Ducasse, O. Nierstrasz, N. Schärli, R. Wuyts, and A. P. Black. Traits: A mechanism for fine-grained reuse. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 28(2):331--388, 2006.

Digital Library

[9]

ECMA. ECMA-335: Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). ECMA, Geneva (CH), third edition, June 2005.

[10]

C. Esterbrook. Using Mix-ins with Python. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4540.

Digital Library

[11]

E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides. Design patterns. Elements of reusable object-oriented software. Addison-Wesley Professional, -c1995, 1995.

Digital Library

[12]

D. Ingalls, T. Kaehler, J. Maloney, S. Wallace, and A. Kay. Back to the future: the story of squeak, a practical smalltalk written in itself. In OOPSLA '97: Proceedings of the 12th ACMSIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, pages 318--326, New York, NY, USA, 1997. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[13]

IronPython. http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython.

[14]

JRuby. http://jruby.codehaus.org/.

[15]

Jython. http://www.jython.org/.

[16]

S. Keene. CLOS and the Meta Object Protocol. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1989.

[17]

W. R. LaLonde and J. R. Pugh. Inside Smalltalk: vol. 1 and 2. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 1990.

Digital Library

[18]

C. Lattner and V. Adve. LLVM: A Compilation Framework for Lifelong Program Analysis & Transformation. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO'04), Palo Alto, California, Mar 2004.

Digital Library

[19]

T. Lindholm and F. Yellin. The JavaTM Virtual Machine Specification (2nd Edition). Prentice Hall PTR, April 1999.

Digital Library

[20]

P. Maes. Concepts and experiments in computational reflection. In OOPSLA '87: Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, pages 147--155, New York, NY, USA, 1987. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[21]

Martin Richards. Bcpl benchmark. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/Bench.html.

[22]

E. Meijer and P. Drayton. Static typing where possible, dynamic typing when needed: The end of the cold war between programming languages. In OOPSLA'04 Workshop on Revival of Dynamic Languages, 2004.

[23]

Microsoft .NET. http://www.microsoft.com/net/.

[24]

Rhino. http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/.

[25]

A. Rigo, M. Hudson, and S. Pedroni. Compiling dynamic language implementations. Technical Report D05.1, PyPy Consortium, 2005. http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/index-report.html.

[26]

A. Rigo and S. Pedroni. PyPy's approach to virtual machine construction. In OOPSLA Companion, pages 944--953, 2006.

Digital Library

[27]

Slang. http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2267.

[28]

Sun Microsystems. JSR 292: Supporting dynamically typed languages on the Java platform. http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=292.

[29]

The Mono Project. http://www.mono-project.com.

[30]

C. to PyPy. http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/contributor.html.

[31]

G. Van Rossum. Unifying types and classes in Python 2.2. http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2.3/descrintro/.

Cited By

Contreras-Sepúlveda WVillegas-Martínez BGesing SSánchez-Mondragón JSánchez-Pérez JVidales-Basurto CEscobedo-Alatorre JTorres-Palencia APalillero-Sandoval OLicea-Rodriguez JLozano-Crisóstomo NGarcía-Melgarejo JPalacios-Perez E(2024)Unleashing quantum algorithms with Qinterpreter: bridging the gap between theory and practice across leading quantum computing platformsPeerJ Computer Science10.7717/peerj-cs.231810(e2318)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.2318
Bernstein MBolz-Tereick CMonat RRubio-González C(2024)Dr Wenowdis: Specializing Dynamic Language C Extensions using Type InformationProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on the State Of the Art in Program Analysis10.1145/3652588.3663316(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652588.3663316
Anand AThakur M(2024)Partial program analysis for staged compilation systemsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-024-00458-xOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-024-00458-x
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

RPython: a step towards reconciling dynamically and statically typed OO languages
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Object oriented languages

Recommendations

Bringing dynamic languages to .NET with the DLR
DLS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Dynamic languages

From the beginning, Microsoft's .NET framework was designed to support a broad range of different programming languages on a Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR provides shared services to these languages ranging from a world-class GC and JIT to a ...
Integration of BETA with Eclipse -- An Exercise in Language Interoperability

This paper presents language interoperability issues appearing in order to implement support for the BETA language in the Java-based Eclipse integrated development environment. One of the challenges is to implement plug-ins in BETA and be able to load ...
Parallel virtual machines with RPython
DLS '16

The RPython framework takes an interpreter for a dynamic language as its input and produces a Virtual Machine (VM) for that language. RPython is being used to develop PyPy, a high-performance Python interpreter. However, the produced VM does not support ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DLS '07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Dynamic languages

October 2007

108 pages

ISBN:9781595938688

DOI:10.1145/1297081

Program Chairs:
Pascal Costanza
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
,
Robert Hirschfeld
Hasso-Plattner-Institut Potsdam, Germany

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2007

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

OOPSLA07

Sponsor:

OOPSLA07: ACM SIGPLAN Object Oriented Programming Systems and Applications Conference

October 22, 2007

Quebec, Montreal, Canada

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 77 submissions, 42%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

100
Total Citations
View Citations
824
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)35
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)10

Reflects downloads up to 30 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Contreras-Sepúlveda WVillegas-Martínez BGesing SSánchez-Mondragón JSánchez-Pérez JVidales-Basurto CEscobedo-Alatorre JTorres-Palencia APalillero-Sandoval OLicea-Rodriguez JLozano-Crisóstomo NGarcía-Melgarejo JPalacios-Perez E(2024)Unleashing quantum algorithms with Qinterpreter: bridging the gap between theory and practice across leading quantum computing platformsPeerJ Computer Science10.7717/peerj-cs.231810(e2318)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.2318
Bernstein MBolz-Tereick CMonat RRubio-González C(2024)Dr Wenowdis: Specializing Dynamic Language C Extensions using Type InformationProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on the State Of the Art in Program Analysis10.1145/3652588.3663316(1-8)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652588.3663316
Anand AThakur M(2024)Partial program analysis for staged compilation systemsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-024-00458-xOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-024-00458-x
Melançon OFeeley MSerrano MSaraiva JDegueule TScott E(2023)An Executable Semantics for Faster Development of Optimizing Python CompilersProceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3623476.3623529(15-28)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623476.3623529
Chevalier-Boisvert MKokubun TGibbs NWu SPatterson AIssroff JBruno RMoss E(2023)Evaluating YJIT’s Performance in a Production Context: A Pragmatic ApproachProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes10.1145/3617651.3622982(20-33)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617651.3622982
Shajii ARamirez GSmajlović HRay JBerger BAmarasinghe SNumanagić IVerbrugge CLhoták OShen X(2023)Codon: A Compiler for High-Performance Pythonic Applications and DSLsProceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction10.1145/3578360.3580275(191-202)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3578360.3580275
Yang YMilanova AHirzel MLo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Complex Python features in the wildProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528467(282-293)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524842.3528467
Ortin FGarcia MPerez-Schofield BQuiroga J(2022)The StaDyn programming languageSoftwareX10.1016/j.softx.2022.10121120(101211)Online publication date: Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2022.101211
Anand AThakur M(2022)Principles of Staged Static+Dynamic Partial AnalysisStatic Analysis10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_4(44-73)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_4
Garcia RLiu ESreekanti VYan BDandamudi AGonzalez JHellerstein JSen K(2021)Hindsight logging for model trainingProceedings of the VLDB Endowment10.14778/3436905.343692514:4(682-693)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.14778/3436905.3436925
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents