[pypy-dev] unlurking

[Douglas McNeil]

Hi, all.

Brief intro: Canadian astronomy graduate student, does lots of python
programming, thinks pypy is a cool idea and has been lurking for a long
time. :)

Some of my codes are in C for speed reasons, but they're a lot uglier than
the python equivalents would be.. I really wish there were a way to get C
speed out of python without going the numarray/pyrex/weave routes, so the
translator/annotator stuff interests me for reasons entirely unrelated to
pypy itself.  Numeric codes tend not to be very dynamic so static analysis
should be able to go a long way.

The translator code is surprisingly easy to read!  It didn't take long
before I had fun playing with flowgraph optimization.  Just cheap hacks to
do loop hoisting and remove more deadops, making dangerous assumptions all
over the place, and adding a SomeFloat type to see how that works, but it
was nice to see that after a lot of dir(this) and dir(that) to grok the
data structure you get the hang of it.  The flowgraph viewer helped a lot.

I have a thousand questions but I should see what more I can learn from
the code itself first before troubling anyone!  Congratulations on getting
the funding, and here's hoping Guido's wrong about what python 3.0's
written in. :)


Doug

--
Queen's University Astronomy Research Group
Planetary Dynamics Division			"We create worlds."