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

Maciej Fijalkowski fijall at gmail.com
Wed Nov 14 15:57:13 CET 2007


On Nov 14, 2007 3:38 PM, David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>
wrote:

> Carl Friedrich Bolz wrote:
> > Hi Martijn,
> >
> > let me first note that I agree with a lot of your points, when not
> > taking the financial side of things into account. I will ignore the
> > financial side of things in this mail (since I don't think anybody
> > proposes to focus on something completely different than our Python
> > interpreter _without_ major financial incentives).
> >
> > Martijn Faassen wrote:
> > [snip]
> >  > Again, I'm not trying to criticize what the project has already done.
> >  > I'm trying to be a voice of pragmatism and the voice of a potential
> open
> >  > source end-user. Listen to me if you like; it's not an enemy voice.
> >  > There are two PyPy technologies that I can see that are close to
> >  > pragmatic fruition now:
> >  >
> >  > * writing CPython modules in RPython (I completely lost track of what
> >  > the state of this is since there have been a lot of changes)
> >
> > It's still working but mostly accidentally. It needs some rethinking and
> > a rewrite. We have now better machinery and also ideas how to make it
> > really fast, but it's a manpower problem.  There isn't anyone interested
> > enough in supporting this in the current PyPy team. If somebody outside
> > the current PyPy-team really wanted this and were willing to work on it
> > we (or at least me personally) would give him all the support we can.
> Sorry for jumping in, and I hope this is not too OT, but what is missing
> for a 'real' CPython alternative ?
>    - some bits of the standard library: how much ? Can this be worked
> on by people 'outside pypy' (by outside, I mean people who know python,
> who are willing to learn rpython, but who cannot work on the whole
> translation/gc/JIT/whatever because they are not smart enough, someone
> like me :) )


Yes and yest. This is our major problem and it could be worked by people
from outside, but I would wait for two things a) completion of app-level
ctypes (it's not far, needs only pure-python code) b) separate compilation
(hard, but very high on our todo list)


>
>    - some language constructs (my understanding is that the current
> language supported is python2.4 ?) ?

No, this is perfectly fine.

>
>    - implementation problems (some things too slow, not backward
> compatible) ?
>

Slow, yes. Some things. But this is incremental work all over the place.
Recently there has been a lot of improvements in string/unicode area for
example. If you feel like profiling certain parts (like regular
expressions), would be cool.

Cheers,
fijal
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