[pypy-dev] website update / pypy developments

[Armin Rigo]

Hello Holger,

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 07:16:14AM +0200, holger krekel wrote:
> > >  After some discussions especially with Armin 
> > > i now think that we should promote as a goal to 
> > >
> > >   dynamically tie into/adapt arbritrary C-Libraries and
> > >   operation system calls. 

You and me discussed this at EuroPython, but I expressed the thought that this
could be *one* of the various ambitious goals of the project. Using libffi or
some other custom machinery to call native C libraries directly from Python is
one step (though you can already do that with ctypes, as you mentioned). It is
true that it is probably easier and cleaner to do it with PyPy because we
control low-level code emission much more closely; some more hacking could
probably get us rid of glibc altogether.

Getting rid of glibc is a neat idea, but all the other goals that we discussed
in pypy-dev and on the sprints are also important in other respects and should
not be disregarded if we want to promote PyPy as a "software platform". I, for
example, tend to attach a lot of value to the interpreter's great flexibility
as an experimentation platform. Others want to make object spaces with
slightly or heavily customized semantics, dream to plug-and-play their own
syntax, or just build lightweight versions of Python. All these goals together
are what make a great and ambitious project !


A bientot,

Armin.