Comment by bheadmaster
Comment by bheadmaster 16 hours ago
In my view, the biggest advantages of ahead-of-time compilation is lower binary size, higher performance, and binary portability (in a sense of being able to copy the binary and run it on another system with same architecture and OS, not in the usual sense of being easy to run to a different system architecture or OS).
It is IMO not known widely enough that Python itself can be compiled, using Nuitka [0] compiler. It still runs Python code, so the performance increase is not as extreme as one would get from rewriting in a fully statically typed code, but the AOT compiled C code is still faster than the interpreter.
Is lower binary size or binary portability really a major concern for statistical computing? In my experience with statistical computing with R and using R I've never once had a situation where producing a binary was required? As for portability, I mean can just share the script and the data right?