[thaumasiotes]

> you can transpile any bit of Python or Lisp or Haskell or Rust or JS into C but the opposite isn’t necessarily true because not all those language support all the features exposed in C (such as goto

Turing-completeness tells you that it is in fact necessarily true that you can convert any bit of C into a corresponding bit of Python, Lisp, or Haskell. One obvious approach would be to emit code that implements a C runtime.

For goto in specific, you don't even need to do that. You don't need a goto keyword to implement goto functionality.

[IgorPartola]

Let’s be careful here. All these languages are Turing complete. Heck, isn’t CSS Turing complete now? But insofar as goto in C produces a certain small amount of CPU instructions (1? 2?), can all those other higher level languages do the same? Or will something like JavaScript need a callback-based solution that will do several pointer lookups, memory allocation, etc?

[jcelerier]

> One obvious approach would be to emit code that implements a C runtime.

how could you negate the python interpreter startup time though ?

[thaumasiotes]

Are we talking about compiling or performance? You negate the Python interpreter startup time by changing your implementation of the Python binary, but that isn't relevant to the problem of producing compiler output in the Python language.