[pypy-dev] pypy on Tim Bray's blog

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 11 Nov 2007 09:14:54 +0100, Martijn Faassen writes:
>Hi there,
>
>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/11/08/PyPy
>
>It might be worth it for someone to comment on it, as the one comment 
>there is rather negative about PyPy (it'd really help to have PyPy 
>interpreters in production somewhere, as before you do, the criticism in 
>the comment cannot be properly countered)

Somebody not in the project can comment on it if they like.  I'm
not in the habit of responding to troll-bait.  If that person 
sincerely thinks that we haven't produced much in 2 years then
he either is completely unaware of what we have done, or he
cannot understand it.

I'm fine with combatting ignorance, but not the with people in the
'my-sports-teams-is-better-than-your-sports-team' mode.  

>
>I'm not sure how to interpret Tim Bray's post. Frankly, I was a bit 
>disappointed by what made it in there. It's interesting to analyze as it 
>gives some clue about how your pitch was received and understood.

Tim can understand all the implications of new technology and we
really impressed him.  His problem was in believing that we had done
what we had said, and now that we can do what we promised.  And he
is not techie -- in the sense of being a language designer who
has read all the neat scientific papers of language design -- he
lives close to the programming-not-deeply-informed-by-computer science
world.

>
>It's too bad the potential of a compliant, maintainable Python 
>implementation on the JVM doesn't seem to make it to his blog. I assume 
>you also pitched actual work on *Python* on, say, the JVM, to him as a 
>possible candidate for funding. As opposed to any arbitrary language, 
>which basically lets Tim change the topic to a Ruby discussion.

Tim is very Ruby focused.  He's not interested in python, he said,
because 'the ruby community is more vibrant'.  Vibrant is measured
in body-count.  He's funding all the reimplimentations of Ruby,
and know s the people, and likes the people.  So he has a certain
amount of loyalty to them, too.

He really wants to make Rails faster.  He says Django is "as good as
rails" or something to that effect, but that doesn't change the fact
that what he wants to do is make rails faster.

>It's also too bad that the whole idea of instrumenting the translation 
>process to do neat stuff doesn't really make it to his blog post. The 
>tainting stuff is mentioned, but that's it. What about garbage 
>collectors and JITs?

He saw all of these.  When I asked about funding for tools to make
it easier to, say, find out if Erlang-type concurrency was a good
idea, he said he would think about it.  His wide-finder
experiment only showed that the Erlang string-processing libraries aren't
as good as Python's, not if Erlang's concurrency model would be
a good things to stick into languages.  He liked the idea of
experimentation, very much, but we had just blown him away with
the architecture that he didn't want to think about that then.
Plus he got an emergency trip to Japan put in his plate at short
notice.

Think of this as very positive.

We go spend a whole day at Sun on Monday, focused on the JVM.
John Rose, who is organising this, and who knows Samuele from
a currently running Java expert committee, has invited some
people, including some JRuby people to attend.  John Rose is
already _really excited about this_.

What's the worst that can happen?  We get to support our Python habit
by building an interpreter for Ruby.  Somebody was going to come along
and do it sooner or later, i.e. as soon as PyPy is making everything
go at speed, not just integer math.  i.e. as soon as we stop spending
50% of our time in the garbage collector!

There is nothing but good news here.  Be happy for us.

>Regards,
>
>Martijn
>
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