[pypy-dev] This Week in PyPy 4

[Michael Hudson]

Introduction
============

This is the fourth of what will hopefully be many summaries of what's
been going on in the world of PyPy in the last week.  I'd still like
to remind people that when something worth summarizing happens to
recommend if for "This Week in PyPy" as mentioned on:

    http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/weekly/

where you can also find old summaries.

There were about 50 commits to the pypy section of codespeak's
repository since the last summary (not quite a week).


SomePBC-refactoring
===================

We attacked the RTyper quite a lot, which meant staring at some of the
most obscure code in the codebase, and made substantial but incomplete
progress (currently about 60% of the rtyper tests pass).  We're
optimistic that the majority of work is done on the branch, but there
may be many strange details to cope with before translate_pypy runs
again.


Sprint Preparation
==================

The next sprint is less than two weeks away -- it's definitely time to
be buying flights and booking accomodation if you're going to be there
:)


LLVM progress
=============

Richard implemented threading in the LLVM backend, bringing another
feature that was previously pypy-c only in.  Stacklessness next?


PyPy spreads
============

Christian returned from America where he'd been consulting for a
company implementing some systems in RPython which had been
implemented in Java, and after some effort beating the Java versions
for performance.  This company had found out about PyPy and RPython
from reading our mailing lists -- a nice example of how open
development processes can work (and even make you money!).


Resource consumption
====================

As part of being EU-funded, we have to keep track of the resources we use
and have a slightly unusual problem: we haven't spent enough time or
money in the first half of the project, and have to find something to
do about this...


PyPy at conferences
===================

All three talks on PyPy that we submitted to PyCon were accepted, so
there will be talks from 

 - Michael and Christian on the current state of PyPy (whatever that
   may be at the time :),

 - Holger and Armin on the architecture and future of PyPy, and 

 - Bea and Holger on the methodology of PyPy and the issues around
   being EU funded.

Further to that, two papers were accepted for the Chaos Communication
Congress in Berlin over the new year were accepted:

   http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/585.en.html
   http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/586.en.html

Again, one talk is on the technology of PyPy and the other on
methodology/business issues.

So if you're going to a Python or hacker conference any time soon,
you're likely to hear about PyPy :)

-- 
  Any form of evilness that can be detected without *too* much effort
  is worth it...  I have no idea what kind of evil we're looking for
  here or how to detect is, so I can't answer yes or no.
                                       -- Guido Van Rossum, python-dev