Hi Niklaus, Sorry for the delay. I've indeed been quite deeply into the PyPy sprint... At which level and with which style the array module should be implemented is indeed a bit unclear. If you are going for an app-level version, you should not worry too much about geninterp, I guess. The code you already started to write makes sense. Geninterp is most useful to solve bootstrapping issues, where we cannot import yet some app-level code but we can run its geninterp'ed version (e.g. for the _exceptions.py module). Of course geninterp gives some performance improvement too. The problem with array is that it is designed with the following model in mind: a bunch of memory out of which Python values can be read on demand. The other point of view -- a list of Python values that can be turned into a big string on demand -- make methods like byteswap() hard to implement, specially for arrays of floats or doubles. Not necessarily impossible, though. If this app-level approach works out, I wouldn't invest too much effort in geninterp compatibility, because at some point in the future we might have to think about a quite different approach: adding the notion of integers and floats of specific sizes, at least in the so-called "low-level" types. I guess that an efficient implementation of array should be written to take advantage of these. This will likely require as-yet-unspecified ways to interact between regular interp-level code and this low-level-typed code. In summary I guess that writing a pure app-level array module makes sense, with the buffer interface working for PyPy only. On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 06:15:01PM +0200, Niklaus Haldimann wrote:

As I probably told you, Lutz Paelike has sent me an incomplete array implementation he wrote at the PyCon sprint. He uses StringIO to represent the arrays internally as pure binary data. This is quite sensible if you are after a quick pure Python implementation. But of course it's useless if you want to be RPythonic.

I'm not sure I understand this: using StringIO in this way can be sufficiently static to be geninterped. Both the direction you started and this StringIO-based version make sense. A bientot, Armin.