[pypy-dev] Development philosophy

[Jacob Hallén]

Hi everyone,

I have been following several discussions that have been going on in the past 
couple of weeks concering the speed of certain parts of the code and the size 
of the the code base. While I think the sentiments about the different things 
are absolutely right, I think that the limited resources that we have require 
us to make choices in what we do and when we do it.

My views are that:

- Apart from a few libraries, like socket() and I/O, it doesn't matter that 
the library code is extremely slow, for the time being. We want to find some 
application where we can make a big difference early, rather than try to be 
everything to everyone from the start. Things like zlib and cryptography can 
be very slow, as long as they are correct.

- For core language functionality, speed matters a lot. Apart from the JIT 
work, which still is a long term project, I can see a couple of useful 
avenues for improving speed. One is optimising calls, which Samuele has more 
thoughts about. The other one is to dig into the list operation 
microbenchmarks, where our performance is a lot worse than CPython 2.4. List 
operations are a very large part of most real Python applications (like all 
the zillion web frameworks) and improving them may increase our chances of 
adoption before the JIT work is usable.

- I agree that the size of the project in lines of code is getting 
problematic, but I think it would be a mistake to start doing anything about 
it at this point in time. We are still not doing well enough for completeness 
and correctness to start simplifying the code. we need to tackle one aspect 
at a time. Otherwise we won't be able to see if we are making progress or 
just making things worse.

Our planned work to make Django run is very much about completeness and 
correctness. Let's keep our focus there for a while.

Jacob