Hi Lawrence, On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 02:09:57PM +0200, Lawrence Oluyede wrote:

...

+* Rewrite one or several CPython extension modules to be based on **ctypes** + (newly integrated in Python 2.5): this is generally useful for Python + developpers, and it is now the best path to write extension modules that are + compatible with both CPython and PyPy. See for example + http://wiki.python.org/moin/CodingProjectIdeas/PygameOnCtypes . A related + idea is to provide efficient numeric arrays (as in numeric/numpy/numarray) + in this way.

How a SoC (2 months longer) task can be? I'd like to apply for this kind of project but I'd like to know more about it too. We can discuss about 5, or 10 or so modules that PyPy needs? Or it's up to the student to choose them?

I would expect the Pygame-on-ctypes proposal to be a full two-months work by itself, but tackling smaller modules might indeed allow 5 or more of them to be done. About the modules choice, yes, it's mostly up to the student. There are many built-in CPython modules that we are missing, and thus having them would be nice, but on the other hand some non-built-in modules are just cooler and more widely used (I'm a Pygame fan :-). For reference, the built-in modules that we have (or at least started to work on) are in http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/dist/pypy/module or in http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/dist/pypy/lib if they've been reimplemented purely at app-level. Looking at the list of CPython 2.4 modules, I find a lot of small or medium useful built-in modules that PyPy is missing -- a personal selection in alphabetical order: * _curses * _ssl * bz2 * fcntl * mmap * os (i.e. posix/nt, partially done) * readline (a topic by itself: write or find existing readline replacements in pure Python, also useful for CPython) * select * signal * termios * time (partially done) * zipimport * zlib Feel free to propose any choice, from this list or not, here or on #pypy. A bientot, Armin.