
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014, at 13:47, Kevin Modzelewski wrote:
Hi all, thanks for the responses, but I guess I should have been more explicit -- I'm curious about *why* PyPy is slow on existing extension modules and why people are being steered away from them. I completely support the push to move away from CPython extension modules, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect that programmers will rewrite all the extension modules they use.
Put another way, I understand how having a JIT-understandable cffi module will be faster on PyPy than an extension module, but what I don't quite understand is why CPython extension modules have to be slower on PyPy than they are on CPython. I'm not saying that extension modules should be sped up by PyPy, but I'm curious why they have a reputation for being slower.
There are several reasons. Two of the most important are 1) PyPy's internal representation of objects is different from CPython's, so a conversion cost must be payed every time objects pass between pure Python and C. Unlike CPython, extensions with PyPy can't poke around directly in data structures. Macros like PyList_SET_ITEM have to become function calls. 2) Bridging the gap between PyPy's GC and CPython's ref counting requires a lot of bookkeeping.