[pypy-dev] PyPy 1.6 released

[Dan Stromberg]

Sweet.  ^_^  I see the permissions bits look better now too.

I miss os.stat().st_rdev though - was it removed for a reason?

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com>wrote:

> ========================
> PyPy 1.6 - kickass panda
> ========================
>
> We're pleased to announce the 1.6 release of PyPy. This release brings a
> lot
> of bugfixes and performance improvements over 1.5, and improves support for
> Windows 32bit and OS X 64bit. This version fully implements Python 2.7.1
> and
> has beta level support for loading CPython C extensions.  You can download
> it
> here:
>
>    http://pypy.org/download.html
>
> What is PyPy?
> =============
>
> PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement
> for
> CPython 2.7.1. It's fast (`pypy 1.5 and cpython 2.6.2`_ performance
> comparison)
> due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.
>
> This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64 or Mac OS X.
>  Windows 32
> is beta (it roughly works but a lot of small issues have not been fixed so
> far).  Windows 64 is not yet supported.
>
> The main topics of this release are speed and stability: on average on
> our benchmark suite, PyPy 1.6 is between **20% and 30%** faster than PyPy
> 1.5,
> which was already much faster than CPython on our set of benchmarks.
>
> The speed improvements have been made possible by optimizing many of the
> layers which compose PyPy.  In particular, we improved: the Garbage
> Collector,
> the JIT warmup time, the optimizations performed by the JIT, the quality of
> the generated machine code and the implementation of our Python
> interpreter.
>
> .. _`pypy 1.5 and cpython 2.6.2`: http://speed.pypy.org
>
>
> Highlights
> ==========
>
> * Numerous performance improvements, overall giving considerable speedups:
>
>  - better GC behavior when dealing with very large objects and arrays
>
>  - **fast ctypes:** now calls to ctypes functions are seen and optimized
>    by the JIT, and they are up to 60 times faster than PyPy 1.5 and 10
> times
>    faster than CPython
>
>  - improved generators(1): simple generators now are inlined into the
> caller
>    loop, making performance up to 3.5 times faster than PyPy 1.5.
>
>  - improved generators(2): thanks to other optimizations, even generators
>    that are not inlined are between 10% and 20% faster than PyPy 1.5.
>
>  - faster warmup time for the JIT
>
>  - JIT support for single floats (e.g., for ``array('f')``)
>
>  - optimized dictionaries: the internal representation of dictionaries is
> now
>    dynamically selected depending on the type of stored objects, resulting
> in
>    faster code and smaller memory footprint.  For example, dictionaries
> whose
>    keys are all strings, or all integers. Other dictionaries are also
> smaller
>    due to bugfixes.
>
> * JitViewer: this is the first official release which includes the
> JitViewer,
>  a web-based tool which helps you to see which parts of your Python code
> have
>  been compiled by the JIT, down until the assembler. The `jitviewer`_ 0.1
> has
>  already been release and works well with PyPy 1.6.
>
> * The CPython extension module API has been improved and now supports many
>  more extensions. For information on which one are supported, please refer
> to
>  our `compatibility wiki`_.
>
> * Multibyte encoding support: this was of of the last areas in which we
> were
>  still behind CPython, but now we fully support them.
>
> * Preliminary support for NumPy: this release includes a preview of a very
>  fast NumPy module integrated with the PyPy JIT.  Unfortunately, this does
>  not mean that you can expect to take an existing NumPy program and run it
> on
>  PyPy, because the module is still unfinished and supports only some of the
>  numpy API. However, barring some details, what works should be
>  blazingly fast :-)
>
> * Bugfixes: since the 1.5 release we fixed 53 bugs in our `bug tracker`_,
> not
>  counting the numerous bugs that were found and reported through other
>  channels than the bug tracker.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hakan Ardo, Carl Friedrich Bolz, Laura Creighton, Antonio Cuni,
> Maciej Fijalkowski, Amaury Forgeot d'Arc, Alex Gaynor,
> Armin Rigo and the PyPy team
>
> .. _`jitviewer`:
> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/08/visualization-of-jitted-code.html
> .. _`bug tracker`: https://bugs.pypy.org
> .. _`compatibility wiki`:
> https://bitbucket.org/pypy/compatibility/wiki/Home
> _______________________________________________
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> pypy-dev at python.org
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>
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