Hi,

implement it in itself: Not sure what your point is, but you can certainly implement the Python VM in itself. The Python VM is actually quite portable as is demonstrated by the excellent Java based implementation found in Jython.

PyPy is an implementation of the python interpreter, in python, that is seeking to optimize the interpreter. Is there any similar project in Perl?

Too dog slow? Uh, no. See the Twisted project for an example of an "internet event server" whose web server implementation is faster-- and more flexible-- than apache.

Umm... not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but, do you have any numbers on this? As far as I know, Twisted is only faster than Apache on some configurations of MacOS X. Generally it benchmarks slower. We have a lot of optimization left to do in that arena. Of course, twisted.web has been powering our moderately high-traffic site for well over a year at this point, as this graph will show, and we've had zero performance problems.

Twisted Web is "fast enough", and nobody seems seriously interested in optimizing it, but I would hesitate to boldly claim it's "faster than" something else if it doesn't have a clear advantage. I'd have no problem if you said it was faster than Jigsaw, for example: if you want to talk about dog-slow systems, that's a good example.

With a real production webserver like Apache, though, there are a lot of variables to tune. There are obscure interactions to be taken into account. Twisted will surely be slower than well-configured Apache on an SMP system, for example, unless you've got 2 processes working in parallel behind a proxy... and of course, then there's dynamic content, which is an entirely different set of measurements.

The issues are complex, and it doesn't help to advocate the project by oversimplifying them.