On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:50, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:
2009/3/27 Collin Winter <collinw@gmail.com>:
In particular, Windows support is one of those things we'll need to address on our end. LLVM's Windows support may be spotty, or there may be other Windows issues we inadvertently introduce. None of the three of us have Windows machines, nor do we particularly want to acquire them :), and Windows support isn't going to be a big priority. If we find that some of our patches have Windows issues, we will certainly fix those before proposing their inclusion in CPython.
On the assumption (sorry, I've done little more than read the press releases so far) that you're starting from the CPython base and incrementally patching things, you currently have strong Windows support. It would be a shame if that got gradually chipped away through neglect, until it became a big job to reinstate it.
If the Unladen Swallow team doesn't include any Windows developers, you're a bit stuck, I guess, but could you not at least have a Windows buildbot which keeps tabs on the current status? Then you might encourage interested Windows bystanders to check in occasionally and maybe offer fixes.
As things stand, the press releases give me the impression (as a Windows user without a lot of time to invest in contributing) that this project is irrelevant to me, and I should ignore it until you announce "proper" Windows support. By which time, it may have fallen completely off my radar. (On a smaller scale, this happened with virtualenv - I found to my surprise that it now supported Windows, and had for some time without me realising, because when it started it was Unix-only and I had not bothered to keep track of it). Maybe again it's something that could be clarified in the announcements.
It's not a matter of chipping away support. It's a matter of wishing to not write our own JIT, but rather leverage other people's work. That currently means LLVM, but LLVM has a weak Windows story at the moment. Of course, LLVM has little Windows support because it doesn't have any Windows users :-) The changes done so far are (mostly) orthogonal to Windows (the actual performance benefits may depend a little on the platform), but the future work will not be. On the other hand, getting the Windows story straightened out is mostly a matter of getting Windows support in LLVM, and not work specific to Unladen Swallow; hopefully, we can use some of the Windows knowledge on python-dev or elsewhere in the world for that. Notice how I said 'currently' and 'at the moment' and 'future work'. LLVM is also a work in progress, See, for instance, http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStartedVS.html . (And if we were to write our own JIT, we would have the same problem but worse: none of us would be able to write an effective one for Windows, if at all, and we would have a much smaller developer pool to work with. And it would take much longer in the first place.) -- Thomas Wouters <thomas@python.org> Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!