[pypy-dev] paris sprint report day 1.5

[Michael Hudson]

Hi pypy-dev!  The largest PyPy sprint yet (in terms of attendants)
began yesterday here at Logilab in Paris.

The morning (once everyone had found their way/fought with the
metro/...) began with a tutorial for the newcomers and two discussion
groups -- one on implementing stackless-like functionality and one
titled "towards a translatable llinterpreter".

After lunch, everyone met to hear the results of the discussion groups
and decide what to do next.  The stackless group's conclusion was
"it'll be easy!" :) The llinterp group concluded "it might be doable".
More details can be found in svn at

http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/extradoc/sprintinfo/paris-2005-stackless-discussion.txt
http://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/extradoc/sprintinfo/paris/tllinterpreter_planning.txt

(consistency?  We're researchers!)

Christian (he didn't get a choice), Valentino, Anders (L), Adrien,
Armin and Amaury became the stackless working group and by Tuesday
lunchtime had progressed via an unlikely sounding six-person-pair
programming methodology involving a beamer to a fully stackless C
translation, albeit with limited functionality visible even to
RPython.

Samuele, Bert, Arre, Aurelien, and Boris became what was ultimately
known as the 'ootype group' working on a variation of the rtyper more
suited to translation to a language with a richer type system than C
(classes, lists, some vague notion of type safety, etc) such as Java,
Smalltalk, ...

Michael and Andrew worked on a backend that emits machine code -- in
particular ppc32 machine code -- directly.  By the end of Monday a toy
function doing some simple integer calculations had been translated
but on Tuesday restructuring towards re-use (and comprehensibility)
became the main goal.  Oh, and not assuming an infinite supply of
registers...

Carl and Holger started implementing Addresses in the C backend to
prepare for the coming llinterpreter work, finishing on Monday
evening.  Carl then worked on data structures needed for a
translatable llinterpreter.

Cheers,
mwh & cfbolz

-- 
 As it seems to me, in Perl you have to be an expert to correctly make
 a nested data structure like, say, a list of hashes of instances.  In
 Python, you have to be an idiot not  to be able to do it, because you
 just write it down.             -- Peter Norvig, comp.lang.functional