Introduction ============ This is the fifth of what will hopefully be many summaries of what's been going on in the world of PyPy in the last week. I'd still like to remind people that when something worth summarizing happens to recommend if for "This Week in PyPy" as mentioned on: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/weekly/ where you can also find old summaries. I note in passing that the idea of keeping track of IRC conversations in the weekly summary has pretty much fizzled. Oh well. There were about 230 commits to the pypy section of codespeak's repository in the last week (a busy one, it seems :-). SomePBC-refactoring =================== We merged the branch at last! Finishing the branch off and getting translate_pypy running again seemed to mostly involve fighting with memoized functions and methods, and the "strange details" hinted at in the last "This Week in PyPy" were not so bad -- indeed once we got to the point of rtyping finishing, the backend optimizations, source generation, compilation and resulting binary all worked first time (there must be something to be said for this Test Driven Development stuff :). If you recall from the second This Week in PyPy the thing that motivated us to start the branch was wanting to support multiple independent object spaces in the translated binary. After three weeks of refactoring we hoped we'd made this possible... and so it proved, though a couple of small tweaks were needed to the PyPy source. The resulting binary is quite a lot (40%) bigger but only a little (10%) slower. CCC papers ========== As mentioned last week, two PyPy talks have been accepted for the Chaos Communication Congress. The CCC asks that speakers provide papers to accompany their talks (they make a proceedings book) so that's what we've done, and the results are two quite nice pieces of propaganda for the project: http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/talk/22c3/agility.pdf http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/talk/22c3/techpaper.pdf It's still possible to attend the conference in Berlin, from December 27th to the 30th: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005 A number of PyPy people will be around and innocently mixing with people from other communities and generally be available for discussing all things PyPy and the future. Background EU-related work ========================== Less visible but still requiring work, organisations funding and organizing the EU PyPy project are currently preparing a lot of paperwork and reports. Most of the reports are mostly done by now but the next Göteborg sprint will start with two (insider only) days of dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's. Let's all hope that everything goes well at our first major EU review at the end of January. Meanwhile, Holger was invited to give a talk about PyPy's technical organisation at a workshop given by the german EU office on the 5th of December. Also, Bea, Alastair and Holger will talk about PyPy at an EU workshop on the 8th of December in Bruxelles. Hopefully, this will enable us to find more opportunities to get PyPy recognized as an interesting "live" project in the EU's corner of the world. Where did PyPy-sync go? ======================= What's a pypy-sync meeting? Apparently:: It's an XP-style meeting that serves to synchronize development work and let everybody know who is working on what. It also serves as a decision board of the PyPy active developers. If discussions last too long and decisions cannot be reached they are delegated to a sub-group or get postponed. pypy-sync meetings usually happen on thursdays at 1pm CET on the #pypy-sync IRC channel on freenode, with an agenda prepared beforehand and minutes posted to pypy-dev after the meeting. Except that the last couple haven't really happened this way -- no agenda and only a few people have turned up and mostly just the people who are in #pypy all week anyway. So after the Göteborg sprint next week we're going to try harder to prepare and get developers to attend pypy-sync meetings again. This is especially important as we head towards more varied and less intrinsically related challenges such as a JIT compiler, integration of logic programming, GC, higher level backends and much more. -- Check out the comments in this source file that start with: # Oh, lord help us. -- Mark Hammond gets to play with the Outlook object model