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I'm not sure what you mean - you gain not having to port anything, which sounds pretty great to me.

And for the Ruby C extensions we tried not only did we not have to port them from C to Ruby, they actually ran faster than either the compiled C version or the pure Ruby version because we can inline and optimise between the two languages.



I mean the cost of porting vs writing a whole new C interpreter - sounds like a lot of work.


This way it's a lot of work for one small team to write the C interpreter, compared to a still quite a lot of work for every team with a C extension that would need to port it to Python.


Writing a C interpreter isn't that bad, especially considering you can co-opt Clang's frontend and use it to do all the syntax and semantic analysis.


There's a reason new languages, compilers are made rather than everyone just porting their code to the Assembler of new CPU.

Same reason applies here.




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