[pypy-dev] Please give advice for newbie reading pypy source......

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Chris,

On Sat, Jul 09, 2005 at 11:22:37PM -0700, seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:
> I'm really excited about learning PyPy source code really well
> and possibly helping the project in some capacity.
> Reading source code inevitably leads to tons of questions.

Great!

> **Any advice on how to progress quickly in PyPy source code understanding?**

Tough question :-)  I suppose that the starting point should be the
architecture document.  It should point you to particular areas of the
source code, depending on your interests.  For example, if you are
looking for the classical bytecode-dispatcher interpreter main loop,
you could start at pypy/interpreter/pyopcode.py.  If you want to see
some built-in functions, see pypy/module/__builtin__/.  Or implementation
of built-in types, e.g. dictionaries: see pypy/objspace/std/dictobject.py.
On the other hand, if you're more into translation and type inference,
try running pypy/bin/translator.py and following the code paths from
there.

In general I would suggest to try to follow the documentation for specific
directories along.  Please don't hesitate to ask if the documentation
can't be easily found, or if it's not helpful enough.

> Any chance there are PyPy people close to San Diego, California??

Not that I know of :-)  For some reason, there are not many US-based
PyPy people.

> Any better method than posting questions to this mailing list and
> slowly getting replies to all my questions?

I, at least, will try to answer your questions more quickly than I
answered this e-mail.  You may also try irc, #pypy on irc.freenode.net,
though we are generally there on European hours (US West + about 9 hours).


A bientot,

Armin