Lambda the Ultimate

This weekend, I took another crack at trimming microseconds off the common-case path for generic function execution, and succeeded in dropping the excution time from 13.2 microseconds to just over 9.8. (Which is about 9 microseconds overhead added relative to a hand-optimized Python version of the same trivial function.) Along the way, however, I realized a couple of surprising things about Python performance tuning.

An amusing story that tells you something about Python's implementation.

The discussion of closures is of particular interest...

"SFSW" - focussing on languages such as Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, JavaScript, ASP, JSP, ActionScript and ColdFusion. May 30, 2005, Heraklion, Greece. Co-located with 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2005). Call for Papers (PDF).

PS. A Developers Guide to Semantic Web Toolkits for different Programming Languages has now been posted, with feature matrices of toolkits for: C, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lisp, .Net/Mono, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, Ruby.

Is anyone doing functional programming research on transparent (aka orthogonal) persistence?

I've been reading a lot about the subject (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TransparentPersistence) and I've found that promising projects like Eros, Grasshopper, Texas, and others have either died or removed transparent persistence from their projects.

I'm a contributor to an open-source transparent persistent OS (www.torsion.org) that's in the baby stages; I am interested in transparent persistence because of its potential to remove non-pure I/O from functional platforms.

Geoff