[pypy-dev] funding/popularity?

[William ML Leslie]

On 21 December 2010 11:59, Dima Tisnek <dimaqq at gmail.com> wrote:
> More visibility for performance achievements would do
> good too.

Where are pypy's performance achievements *not* visible, but should be?

> Sidetracking... one day when pypy jit/gc/etc are all worked out, how
> hard would it be to use same techniques and most of backends for some
> unrelated language that doesn't have jit yet, e.g. php?

You know that pypy already has implementations of other languages,
right - Scheme, Javascript, Prolog, IO and smallTalk? They aren't
integrated with the translated pypy-c, but they show that it is not
too difficult to write a runtime for any dynamic language you choose.

> And how hard
> would it be to marry two dynamic languages, so that modules from one
> could be used in the other? Or that modules written in rpython could
> be used in several langs?

It's in the "interesting problems" bucket, and the effort required
depends on the level of integration between languages you want.  There
are several projects already attempting to do decent integration
between several languages, besides the approach used on the JVM, there
are also GNU Guile, Racket, and Parrot, among others.  It might be
worth waiting to see how these different projects pan out, before
spending a bunch of effort just to be an also-ran in the
multi-language runtime market.

However, implementing more languages in rpython has the side-effect of
propagating the l * o * p problem: it introduces more and more
implementations that then have to be maintained, so good
cross-language integration probably belongs /outside/ pypy itself, so
existing runtimes can hook into it.

But it would be an interesting experiment (to marry the various
interpreters pypy ships with), if you wanted to try it.

My two cents.

-- 
William Leslie