[pypy-dev] Roadmap draft

[Martijn Faassen]

Carl Friedrich Bolz wrote:
> Just to inform you a bit: Several PyPy developers have sat together and 
> worked on a very rough roadmap for what tasks need to be done to make 
> PyPy a realistic replacement for CPython. The work is going on here:
> 
> https://codespeak.net/svn/pypy/extradoc/planning/roadmap/
> 
> We plan to work on this some more in the next days. As soon as it is in 
> a more finished state we will ask write a mail to pypy-dev again and ask 
> for general feedback.

Hey,

I subscribed to the mailing list again. I'm very glad that this planning 
is taking place.

Some feedback:

If I read it correctly, the list seems more or less to be about an 
end-result to the process, a more or less "ideal" production release. 
Not quite idea perhaps -- library support may still be limited, but yet 
quite a lot of things are in there. That's good for a goal; one should 
set the sights high, and I'm sure the project is capable of 
accomplishing all this technically, eventually.

I think it's also very important to space out how you get there: have 
nearer-term goals with releases that aim to be useful.
I think some of the most important thinking that still that needs to go 
into this roadmap is to figure out how to space this out over multiple 
releases, where you have multiple releases of hopefully increasing 
usefulness. This way you set up a positive feedback cycle where people 
test things and hopefully people will be motivated in contributing in 
useful places (libraries and such, and reporting bugs). At least, 
waiting until all of this is completed sounds like it would take quite a 
while as there are many tasks involved.

To get to a list of projected releases, you could restrict your 
ambitions along various dimensions. For instance, you could focus on 
only supporting one or a limited amount of backends for a first release. 
Or you could defer erformance optimizations. Alternatively you could 
restrict the amount of libraries you are going to implement (this is 
already in the roadmap, but on the other hand the support for a GUI 
toolkit is in there too). I'm sure other dimensions exist that I can't 
even think of.

Regards,

Martijn