[pypy-dev] Paris sprint report conclusion

[Carl Friedrich Bolz]

Hi PyPy-dev!

Now that the sprint has ended and we (Micheal, Carl, Armin) are sitting
in the Thalys to Koeln, we fear we should at least write a few words
about the last days.

On Friday morning another discussion group was founded and discussed -
again - the state and future of the l3interpreter (l3 = lll = low low
level), that is the translatable llinterpreter. The results were
presented after lunch, together with some ideas about the JIT.
Afterwards Carl gave a short talk on the results of his summer of code
project on writing garbage collectors in RPython.

Boris, Michael, Bert with help from Samuele spent the whole rest of the
sprint working on the many open issues related to ootyping. Simple
programs can now be ootyped, including inheritance, methods, instance
attributes and right at the end some support for prebuilt instances. In
addition they extended the llinterpreter to understand the ootype
operations as well (we were worried that our names were starting to make
sense).

Armin spent the last days fixing different cases that crashed pypy-c
which he found by running the CPython compliancy tests. In addition he
helped various people to find their way around the codebase.

Adrien and Arre worked on fixing compiler and parser issues that led to
wrong line numbers and different issues that popped up.

Ludovic and Adrien experimented with rewriting parts of the Numeric
package in RPython.

Valentino and Amaury continued on implementing the socket module which
turned out (as expected) to be a platform dependent nightmare. They have
a kind of complete socket module now, but some functions cannot yet be
translated.

Christian worked on an experiment to reorder functions in the created C
code to improve code locality.

Finally, after a week of srapped attemps, much headscratching and heated
discussion there was some code written for the l3interpreter. On
Saturday afternoon Holger and Carl wrote the basic model and managed to
interpret interesting functions like x + 4. On Sunday Samuele and Carl
continued and started on a graph converter that takes ll graphs and
transforms into the form the l3interpreter expects.

On Saturday afternoon there was a planning meeting where the actions of
the following weeks were discussed. The tedious EU-report writing was
distributed to those unfortunate creatures that are paid for working on
PyPy. Furthermore we discussed the various conference and sprints people
want to attend -- it seems that nobody will see home much in the next
few months.

All in all it was a very productive sprint but of course we all have to
recover for two weeks now.

Exhaustedly,

Armin, Michael & Carl Friedrich