Paolo Giarrusso wrote:
Hi, for a student project, we are evaluating the possibility to experiment with some ideas on PyPy.
Even if it is a student project, we have high expectations (our aim is to really improve PyPy's speed, if possible). But we are still trying to choose which features to implement (we started with some nice ideas, but part of them is already implemented).
We will work for something like 2 months on a separate branch - maybe we can give readonly access to the source code repository, but write access would be a problem for our exam, for obvious reasons.
Do you have any possibility to host a development branch for this project?
To let you know who we are, I'll present us:
- I, Paolo 'Blaisorblade' Giarrusso, am a past Linux kernel hacker, I worked also with Java, C++, and a bit of Python, and I am currently a graduate student at Aarhus University, Denmark; - Sigurd is a PhD candidate at Aarhus University, Denmark, currently working, among other things, on a cryptography research project in Python (viff.dk).
- our professor is Lars Bak, the lead architect of the Google V8 Javascript engine, on which we implemented various optimizations in the previous months.
We are obviously open to suggestions, and we have been looking at the status blog and at various blogs.
It seems that there is still space for improvement in the space of garbage collectors, as mentioned here: - http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/talk/osdc2008/paper.txt working on that could be interesting.
Just to go a bit in a different direction than what Armin already wrote: Yes, we would be very interested in having somebody work on our GCs. They currently work, but they are not very advanced in many respects. So if somebody is interested in having a go at them, that would probably be quite useful for PyPy. I can't really say how interesting it would be research-wise, though. Cheers, Carl Friedrich