That post by Behnel is a good find. FWIW, I was at the talk, and my memory was that I also agree that the speaker didn't know what he was talking about regarding optimizations and took incredibly too long to talk about it.
So when the talk is titled "for the first time, there is a consequently executed approach to statically translate the full language extent of Python, with all its special cases, without introducing a new or reduced version of Python", a listener would expect that it be more advanced than previous work. To be fair, neither Aycok's nor Salib's work was complete, but they did enough groundwork to show that static analysis of the type that Nuitka was exploring would not be able to achieve its stated goals.
But all of this pointing to a discussion from 2012 is pretty pointless, as people do use it for distribution - something which wasn't touched on during the talk, as I recall - while the author did talk about aiming for type inference at compile time, when all evidence is that the speaker had little idea of the actual issues, as previous reported in multiple previous attempts.
I honestly don't know what to do when someone presents a talk as a pure hobbyist, puttering around on a project with little interest in what others have done, and who doesn't understand the audience enough to gauge which details are of interest and which aren't. There's a culture mismatch, certainly, but that's what makes it harder to assign fault.
Should Hayen have realized that the project wasn't at the right level for EuroPython, or that the future project goals were overstated? Did EuroPython get more advanced over time? Did van Rossum not allow that weekend hobbyists don't have the experience to judge things? Should van Rossum never say anything negative in public about a project (and if so, at what level of fame does one need to bear that in mind)? I certainly have no answers to those.
There are previous projects, like Michael Salib's "Starkiller: a static type inferencer and compiler for Python" ( http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/16688 ), and John Aycock's "Converting Python Virtual Machine Code to C" (http://legacy.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings/paper...) which explored that optimization space, and no doubt others.
So when the talk is titled "for the first time, there is a consequently executed approach to statically translate the full language extent of Python, with all its special cases, without introducing a new or reduced version of Python", a listener would expect that it be more advanced than previous work. To be fair, neither Aycok's nor Salib's work was complete, but they did enough groundwork to show that static analysis of the type that Nuitka was exploring would not be able to achieve its stated goals.
But all of this pointing to a discussion from 2012 is pretty pointless, as people do use it for distribution - something which wasn't touched on during the talk, as I recall - while the author did talk about aiming for type inference at compile time, when all evidence is that the speaker had little idea of the actual issues, as previous reported in multiple previous attempts.
I honestly don't know what to do when someone presents a talk as a pure hobbyist, puttering around on a project with little interest in what others have done, and who doesn't understand the audience enough to gauge which details are of interest and which aren't. There's a culture mismatch, certainly, but that's what makes it harder to assign fault.
Should Hayen have realized that the project wasn't at the right level for EuroPython, or that the future project goals were overstated? Did EuroPython get more advanced over time? Did van Rossum not allow that weekend hobbyists don't have the experience to judge things? Should van Rossum never say anything negative in public about a project (and if so, at what level of fame does one need to bear that in mind)? I certainly have no answers to those.