[pypy-dev] befunge

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

Hi.

It's really cool that you find pypy as a good platform for writing
interpreters, we're definitely
happy with that :-) In general, we try to remove stuff from lang
rather then put more of it
there. So js/smalltalk/befunge interpreters would hopefully soon
become projects on
its own. On the other hand, we would be happy to give you commit
access on codespeak
so you can check stuff in somewhere there. The exact directory layout
where to put
other interpreters (and how to make different pages for them etc.) is
yet to be determined.

In case you want to use some other hosting service, like google code,
feel free to do so
as well. We would be more than happy to reference it from our web page.

Cheers,
fijal

PS. Everybody is more or less on holiday right now, at least until
next week, hence late
response, sorry for that.

PPS. If you check this stuff somewhere, I think it makes sense to
mention it on the pypy
blog, so please keep us updated.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:26 PM, Terrence
Cole<list-sink at trainedmonkeystudios.org> wrote:
> I have built an RPython implementation of befunge98 on top of pypy.  It
> took about a week at 30%, and about half of that was spent writing a
> befunge implementation of pidigits[1].  I honestly expected to have more
> trouble getting this working, which is one of the reasons I chose
> something as simple as befunge.  There were some hiccups, certainly, but
> compared to working with parrot and llvm, pypy was startlingly easy to
> get up and running.
>
> On to benchmarks.
>
> Time taken to compute the first 1,000 digits of pi:
> befunge.py: 3:03.18
> befunge-c: 0:02.76
>
> As advertised, I was able to write and test in python and run it through
> the translator to get... the wrong test output.  This was, naturally, my
> own fault.  As it turns out, pidigits requires arbitrary precision
> integer support.  A quick skim of rarithmatic and rbignum and a bit of
> hacking later, and I got the awesomely cool results you see above.
>
> It was my plan at this point to lay down some benchmarks against other
> language implementations of pidigits showing how awesome pypy is.
> Unfortunately, the pidigits test is basically entirely limited by the
> performance of the bignum library in use.  This effectively means that
> every language that can use gmp does, and gets a result of 3-7 seconds,
> which makes the pidigits test basically useless for meaningful
> interpreter benchmarking.  That said, it is still a good benchmark for
> bignum libraries, so here goes:
>
> Time taken to compute the first 10,000 digits of pi:
> befunge-c: 5:22.13
> pypy-c [2]: 5:35.26
> python-2.5 [2]: 1:31.56
> python-2.5(gmp) [3]: 0:10.22
>
> >From what I see on the pyjitpl5 branch, jit support seems to be wildly
> in flux at the moment.  I'm thinking I probably want to put jit support
> on hold until things settle down, although it's definitely on my todo
> list.  Supporting jit on top of befunge will, I think, be an interesting
> edge case because the language was specifically designed to be hard to
> compile.
>
> Does pypy want a befunge interpreter?  It is a rather easier to read
> interpreter than malbolge or javascript, although I did write it myself,
> so I may be biased. Some of the more esoteric instructions and edge
> cases are still missing, and there are several improvements that I would
> still like to try, but it basically works now, so I figured I would
> throw it out there.  Pypy isn't using a DVCS, so I'm not sure what the
> best way is for me to share this code.  For now  I've just attached it
> inline -- it's only 12KiB, packed up.  Untar it into the lang directory
> and it will create a befunge subdirectory.  Let me know if there is a
> better way to share code.
>
> -Terrence Cole
>
> [1] -
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=pidigits&lang=all#about
> [2] -
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=pidigits&lang=python&id=1
> [3] -
> http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=pidigits&lang=python&id=3
>
>
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>