[pypy-dev] Re: Looking for a thesis

Antonio Cuni anto.cuni at gmail.com
Fri Mar 10 20:54:46 CET 2006


Michael Hudson wrote:

> Sure.  Will you be able to make it to a sprint?

I have never take part to a sprint, but I'd enjoy to try, if the sprint 
takes place in a reasonable distance from my home.
Yes, Tokio is definitively too far for me. :-)

> There are so many things you could look at... what are your interests?

I'm interested in a number of topics related to programming language 
implementations, such as virtual machines, code analysis & optimization, 
code generation, etc.

To give examples of what I'd like to do, I would have liked to implement 
a javascript backend, but if I'm right there is already an 
implementation, isn't it? Or, to remain in the "already working" things, 
I would have enjoyed to works on the type annotator.

> Off the top of my head I can think of: tuning GC parameters, working
> on alternate representations of app level types (e.g. using the bottom
> bit of a 'pointer' to mark a integer), exploring threading models,
> doing stuff with the greenlets/tasklets/coroutines interface, working
> on interfacing to external functions, ...

the last two points sounds interesting, especially the one about 
greenlets/takslets/coroutines. As soon as I have finished to check out 
pypy-dist from svn I will go to take a look of what is already implemented.

> And as Christian says, how long do you have?

I began programming in 1994, when I was 12; in 2001 I discovered Python 
and since then I have used it for almost every task which I could choose 
the language for.
I think I have a good understanding of how the language works, either 
from a theoretical point of view and an implementation point of view, 
because I have already done some study about CPython internals for the 
university. I have also written a bit compiler for a toy language 
targeting the CPython Virtual Machine.

Apart from python I have had a lot of experience with other platform and 
languages such as C#, C/C++, pascal, javascript and VB (but I'm not 
proud of this ;-).

cheers
Anto



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