[pypy-dev] Non-circular path through pypy module imports

[Antonio Cuni]

VanL wrote:
> Hello,

Hi!
Sorry for the late response, everyone thought that someone else would have 
been answered, but nobody did at the end :-)

> I have been going through the pypy sources recently and I wanted to start from
> the leaf modules first (in terms of import dependencies)... but there don't
> appear to be any leaves.
> 
> For example, starting with baseobjspace in the interpreter, it has 30 or so
> non-stdlib imports, many of them delayed by placing them in functions. Even
> something like rarithmetic eventually pulls in most of the lltype hierarchy. The
> closest I found to a leaf module was extregistry.py.
> 
> Is there a reason for the circularities that I just don't get? If not, why are
> there so many?

Well, for at least some of circularities is partly our fault, we know that the 
import relationships between our modules are a mess currently. Sorry for that.

Anyway, I don't think that starting from the leaves is the best option to 
grasp pypy: probably it's better to pick a topic you are interested in, and 
start from there.

If you are more interested in the translation toolchain (i.e., the 
rpython-to-{c,cli,jvm} compiler), you can start from either the beginning or 
the end of the chain; look for example at the annotation/ directory or at the 
various backends in translator/{c,cli,jvm}.

On the other hand, if you are more interested in the interpreter (i.e., the 
python implementation written in rpython) you want to have a look to 
interpreter/ and objspace/std. The former directory contains the core of the 
interpreter, while the latter contains the implementation of all the standard 
builtin types such as lists, dictionaries, classes, etc.

A good starting point could be the main loop of the interpreter: look at the 
dispatch_bytecode function inside interpreter/pyopcode.py.

I assume that you have already read the pypy documentation online; if not, you 
are strongly encouraged to do that before looking at the source; in 
particular, this document describes the high level architecture of pypy:
http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/architecture.html

More generally, all the pypy documentation is available here:
http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/

ciao,
Anto