[pypy-commit] pypy default: improve the release announcement

[antocuni]

Author: Antonio Cuni <anto.cuni at gmail.com>
Branch: 
Changeset: r46269:29f682cd91eb
Date: 2011-08-04 11:19 +0200
http://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/changeset/29f682cd91eb/

Log:	improve the release announcement

diff --git a/pypy/doc/release-1.6.0.rst b/pypy/doc/release-1.6.0.rst
--- a/pypy/doc/release-1.6.0.rst
+++ b/pypy/doc/release-1.6.0.rst
@@ -3,9 +3,9 @@
 ===========================
 
 We're pleased to announce the 1.6 release of PyPy. This release brings a lot
-of bugfixes and performance improvements over 1.5 as well as improved platform
-support for Windows 32bit and OS X 64bit. This version fully supports
-Python 2.7.1 (XXX .2?) as well as beta level support for C extensions.
+of bugfixes and performance improvements over 1.5, and improves
+support for Windows 32bit and OS X 64bit. This version fully implements
+Python 2.7.1 and has beta level support for loading CPython C extensions.
 You can download it here:
 
     http://pypy.org/download.html
@@ -15,23 +15,66 @@
 
 PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for
 CPython 2.7.1. It's fast (`pypy 1.5 and cpython 2.6.2`_ performance comparison)
-due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.
+due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler. XXX: compare to 2.7.1
+
+This release supports Intel machines running Linux 32/64 or Mac OS X.  Windows
+is beta (it roughly works but a lot of small issues have not been fixed so
+far).  Windows 64 is not yet supported.
+
+The main topics of this release are speed and stability: on average, PyPy 1.6
+is between 20% and 30% faster than PyPy 1.5, and overall it's 4.3 times faster
+than CPython when running our set of benchmarks.
+
+The speed improvements have been made possible by optimizing many of the
+layers which compose PyPy.  In particular, we improved: the Garbage Collector,
+the JIT warmup time, the optimizations performed by the JIT, the quality of
+the generated machine code and the implementation of our Python interpreter.
+
 
 Highlights
 ==========
 
-* Numerous bugfixes
+* Numerous performance improvements, overall giving considerable speedups:
 
-* Numerous performance improvements, overall giving a nice speedups
+  - better GC behavior when dealing with very large objects and arrays
 
-* JitViewer, first official release (XXX)
+  - `fast ctypes`_: now calls to ctypes functions are seen and optimized
+    by the JIT, and they are up to 60 times faster than PyPy 1.5 and 10 times
+    faster than CPython
 
-* multibyte encoding support (XXX which ones)
+  - improved generators(1): simple generators now are inlined into the caller
+    loop, making performance up to 3.5 times faster than PyPy 1.5.
 
-* faster ctypes, now jitted
+  - improved generators(2): thanks to other optimizations, even generators
+    that are not inlined are between 10% and 20% faster than PyPy 1.5.
 
-* better handling of memory pressure from raw allocated blocks (arrays)
+  - faster warmup time for the JIT
 
-* some rudimentary numpy support
+  - JIT support for single floats (e.g., for ``array('f')``)
 
-* JIT support for single floats
+  - optimized dictionaries: the internal representation of dictionaries is now
+    dynamically selected depending on the type of stored objects, resulting in
+    faster code and smaller memory footprint.  For example, dictionaries whose
+    keys are all strings, or all integers.
+
+* JitViewer: this is the first official release which includes the JitViewer,
+  a web-based tool which helps you to see which parts of your Python code have
+  been compiled by the JIT, down until the assembler. XXX: publish a public
+  demo?
+
+- The CPython extension module API has been improved and now supports many
+  more extensions. For information on which one are supported, please refer to
+  our `compatibility wiki`_.
+
+* Multibyte encoding support: this was of of the last areas in which we were
+  still behind CPython, but now we fully support them. (XXX: is that true?)
+
+* Preliminary support for numpy: this release includes a preview of a very
+  fast numpy module integrated with the PyPy JIT.  Unfortunately, this does
+  not mean that you can expect to take an existing numpy program and run it on
+  PyPy, because the module is still unfinished and supports only some of the
+  numpy API.  However, what works is blaizingly fast :-)
+
+* Bugfixes: since the 1.5 release we fixed 53 bugs in our `bug tracker`_, not
+  counting the numerous bugs that were found and reported through other
+  channels than the bug tracker.