holger krekel <hpk@trillke.net> writes:
"finishing" the Annotation refactoring --------------------------------------
That should be easy, right? Actually Guido van Rossum and Armin had started doing type inference/annotation in Belgium just before EuroPython and we have since refactored it already at the Berlin sprint and in between the sprints several times. But it turned out that Annotations as we did them are *utterly broken* in that we try to do a too general system (we had been talking about general inference engines and such) thus making "merging" of two annotations very hard to do in a meaningful way. But after beeing completly crushed on one afternoon, Samuele and Armin came up with a new *simpler* approach that ... worked and promises to not have the same flaws. It got integrated into the translator already and appears to work nicely.
If this scheme is going to stand the test of time, it would be really nice if it got some high-level documentation. I've been trying to follow progress here, but as soon as you look at it, it changes...
I think this is the fourth refactoring of just "three files" and, of course, we already have the 'XXX' virus spreading again :-)
refactoring/rewriting the test framework ----------------------------------------
PyPy has an ever increasing test-suite which requires a lot of flexibility that the standard unittest.py module just doesn't provide. Currently, we have in tool/test.py and interpreter/unittest_w.py a collection of more or less weird hacks to make our (now over 500) tests run either at interpreter level or at application level which means they are actually interpreted by PyPy. Tests from both levels can moreover be run with different object spaces. Thus Stefan Schwarzer and me came up with a rewrite of unittest.py which is currently in 'newtest.py'. During my train ride back to germany i experimentally used our new approach which let our tests run around 30% faster (!) as a side effect. More about this in separate mails as this is - as almost every other area of PyPy - refactoring-in-progress.
I think this stuff looks really cool.
On the Amsterdam sprint maybe more than ever we realized how strongly refactoring is the key development activity in PyPy. Watch those "XXX" :-) Some would argue that we should instead think more about what we are doing but then you wouldn't call that extreme programming, would you?
However, we haven't fixed a site and date for the next sprint, yet.
Here's hoping I'll be able to make that one... Cheers, mwh -- ZAPHOD: You know what I'm thinking? FORD: No. ZAPHOD: Neither do I. Frightening isn't it? -- The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Episode 11