[pypy-dev] Work plan for PyPy

[Antonio Cuni]

Armin Rigo wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi,
sorry, I completely forgot the meeting :-(.
I was even at home and online at that time, but I missed it. At least 
I've read the logs :-).
Here are some notes from my side.

My personal short-term plan is to work a bit to make gencli more or less 
usable as a general .NET compiler, in particular for generating DLLs to 
be imported by others .NET programs.

I personally would like not to work on rpython too much, but I have to 
convince my professor first :-).
After having convinced him, I would like to work on the JIT, in 
particular to port it to ootype (and then add gencli support).


> * The CPy Object Space is going away initially too because it is based
>   on rctypes.  It should not be too hard to port it to rtti in order to
>   continue supporting compiling extension modules for CPython.  We need
>   to think a bit more here - how can we compile ext modules for Jython
>   and IronPython? - but it's likely not a high priority at the moment.

Armin, I read that you asked how hard would be to generate extension 
modules for Jython; the same question apply to IronPython.
I think that the easiest way in the short term is to generate plain 
Java/.NET modules that can be imported by any Java/C# program, and rely 
on Jython/IronPython's mechanism to import it (thus, not relying on the 
CPy objectspace at all).

I've already started in this direction, regarding gencli: the name of 
the front-end is SilveRPython, though I think I will rename it to avoid 
confusion with microsoft silverlight. Currently it mostly works, but I 
have to convince the rtyper not to mangle the name of the classes and 
the methods, because they need to be publicly available from the outside.


> Additionally, some of the independent tasks mentioned:
> 
> * port the stackless transform to ootypesystem

I also would have spotted this point if I were at the meeting :-).
I think it could be a nice topic for sprint, couldn't it?


Finally, a note which is not related with the work plan but to a 
question that appeared in the logs; someone asked whether we want to 
"sell" RPython as a stand-alone product.
Last sunday I gave a PyPy talk at Pycon italy and, surprisingly enough, 
RPython was perceived as the only (or the most relevant) usable product 
of the pypy project. I tried hardly to explain that rpython is basically 
only an accident and not very usable, but people are still impressed by 
the 300000% speedup.
It would be interesting to know if this perception is world-wide or only 
limited to the attendants of my talk (maybe because I didn't stress 
enough the pros of the other pypy goals or the cons of rpython).

ciao Anto