[Matplotlib-devel] building from source with PyPy

[Matti Picus]

Hi. I am a PyPy dev. Today I tried building wxPython Phoenix using PyPy, 
and would like to share my experience :).

It took me a while to find the github repo, the wiki and web site do not 
seem to mention it AFAICT. In fact, the buildbot instructions here 
https://wiki.wxpython.org/ProjectPhoenix/BuildbotSlave tricked me into 
thinking that SVN was stil the preferred method of source control for 
the project. But once I found the github repo 
https://github.com/wxWidgets/Phoenix everything became easier.

Since I am using a dev version of PyPy (not packaged by the Debian 
maintainer, rather the nightly HEAD), I needed to roll my own 
pypy-config based on the python27-config script.

Of course, the build immediately crashed since our C-API compatibility 
is not yet good enough. We seem to have some badly declared function 
signatures that do not match CPython, I will be fixing these over the 
next few weeks, and may need to submit patches or fixes for too 
heavy-duty use of c pointers that I cannot fix on the PyPy side of things.

I would love to get the wxPython toolkit working under PyPY, so I hope 
there are not too many patches needed.

FWIW, we did try to use CFFI instead of the C-API a few years back 
during a Google Summer of Code, the results are languishing on 
https://bitbucket.org/waedt/wxpython_cffi.

So thanks for wxPython, and stay tuned, hopefully I can make some 
progress here

Matti