[pypy-dev] running the pypy toolchain

Ben Mellor cumber at netspace.net.au
Thu Aug 13 04:27:06 CEST 2009


On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:44:02 -0700
Terrence Cole <list-sink at trainedmonkeystudios.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 03:16 -0600, Maciej Fijalkowski wrote: 
> > 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. 
> 
> Thank you for the reply.  I was thinking that the current situation in
> the lang directory would be unmanagable and I was wondering what I was
> missing :-).  
> 
> I have not run into any documentation on making the pypy toolchain run
> from an installed location, rather than from the svn checkout dir.
> Since I don't even understand how autopath works yet, I figured that
> getting something more sophisticated working than what everyone else is
> doing in the lang directory would be an adventure better left for later.
> Is there a plan for making pypy installable?  Is it already possible and
> I just haven't looked hard enough?

What I'm currently doing with an interpreter I'm messing around with is to just
put the path to PyPy in my PYTHONPATH (I'm using the 1.1.0 release right now,
but I think it would work for an svn checkout as well). That works for running
on top of CPython, even with my interpreter project directory completely
outside of the PyPy tree.

Translating is a little less satisfactory. I have a makefile with the following:


# Defualt place to look for PyPy being installed.
PYPY_DIR :=	~/pypy-1.1.0/

# Set target-specific variable to set the translation backend based on the name
# of the target, e.g. fundy-jvm uses the jvm backend.
fundy-%: BACKEND =	--backend=$(@:fundy-%=%)

# Default target: fundy translated with the C backend.
.PHONY: default
default: fundy-c

fundy-%: *.py fundy.grammar
	python $(PYPY_DIR)/pypy/translator/goal/translate.py $(OPT) $(BACKEND)
	$(BATCH) $(TRANSLATE_FLAGS) target_fundy


(plus a few default settings for the variables I haven't defined here, but
they're pretty trivial), and a target_fundy.py file that provides the
target(driver, args) function.

Then I can just type make, or make fundy-jvm, etc, to get the interpreter
translated for any backend (although the C one is the only one working on my
system).

I started with this project in the lang directory of a PyPy svn checkout, but
when the 1.1.0 release was made and I ended up using my interpreter as the
basis for a university essay on programming languages, it spurred me to figure
out how to get it working as a more independent project.

I didn't find much information in the PyPy docs on how to do this, I just
hacked it together. If there are better ways of going about it, I'd like to
know!

I do have ~/pypy-1.1.0/pypy/bin in my PATH (translatorshell.py is just too
nifty), and I have thought it would be handy if there were an entry point
executable for the translation process in there as well. If translate.py or
something equivalent was there, then installing PyPy would consist of untarring
it, setting PYTHONPATH and PATH, and then interpreter projects could just use
it a little more easily.

I guess there's a difference between people who are installing the PyPy python
interpreter, and those who are installing the PyPy translation toolchain. But
what the docs say now about how to build things with the PyPy toolchain is to
cd to pypy/bin/translator/goal and run translate.py targetfile, which
looks a bit like to make things able to be translated you have to put a
targetfile there (and it has to be able to import the rest of your project,
which means either your project is in the PyPy tree, or it's on your
PYTHONPATH).

-- Ben



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