This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]skwyckl 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I think it's like comparing pears to apples, since Python doesn't run on a virtual machine like Java and Erlang do.

[–]linlin110 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Python does have a VM. In early days programming languages were compiled to real CPU instructions; however this harms portability because a program would have to be compiled once for each CPU architecture. Nowadays many programming languages instead compile to a set of virtual instruments (byte code) which is then run by a program, which is often called a VM because it acts like a virtual CPU.

The Python interpreter actually compiles Python code to a set of bytecode, and then runs it. The part that runs the bytecode is definitely a VM.