Brett Cannon snarky.ca

What exactly is Python?  ↦

Brett Cannon, writing for his personal blog:

It’s no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also get Python on to mobile. That all excites me.

But when thinking about the daunting task of creating a new implementation of Python, my brain also began asking the question of what exactly is Python?

What follows from this point in Brett’s post is a stream of consciousness writing style of question and answer, back and forth, iteration over all the points of what makes Python be Python in an attempt to consider what it might take to “compile Python down to WebAssembly.”


Discussion

Sign in or Join to comment or subscribe

5yr ago

“a stream of consciousness writing style of question and answer”, which is a very nice way of saying “brain dump”. 😉

I will say that I did a bit of a dive on WebAssembly on Canada Day and came across AssemblyScript which seems to be a TypeScript subset that requires explicit typing to aligns with WebAssembly. I’m wondering if something similar would make sense for Python, especially now that type hinting has permeated out into the Python community enough for it to be an understood concept? It might be a bit too restrictive, though, as AssemblyScript doesn’t have a string type. But my gut is saying that getting to WebAssembly will take some subset of what CPython accepts as “Python”.

Player art
  0:00 / 0:00