[pypy-dev] JVM backend - status and future work possibilities?

[Michał Bendowski]

Welcome everyone :)

I was wondering what is the current status of the JVM backend. I'm
asking because I am considering working on it for my master's thesis -
I was inspired by a call to action from the "Features" page of
pypy.org. Unfortunately it's unclear to me how much work needs to be
done here. I understand that RPython translation is already
implemented (although might need some care, for the build process to
succeed more easily[1]), but the JIT backend is missing. There is also
no integration with JVM libraries - am I right? On the other hand
there already is a "reference" CLI implementation and a whole thesis
about it.

I'm not familiar with pypy internals at the moment, nor am I a
compiler expert (yet!). I will be very grateful for any advice, as to
whether taking care of the JVM backend is a suitable amount of work,
and whether it can "scale", i.e. be divided into smaller parts that I
can implement along the way and stop if I'm out of time (I imagine I
can always find more work in PyPy).

Thank you,

Michał Bendowski

[1] I was able to build it on Linux from the release-1.5 tag revision.
It fails to build on tip or Mac OS X. Then it can execute some code,
but crashes on pystone.main(10). To be honest, the CLI backend seems
to behave the same with regards to building and pystone.