[pypy-dev] contributing to pypy

[Justin Peel]

You didn't say what sort of work you are looking for. Here are some
ideas that I've had on my TODO (at some point) list:

-contribute to micronumpy
    -astype
    -scalar types like numpy.int8
    -a ufunc that isn't implemented yet

-speed up json module by adapting simplejson's pypy-support branch's
somewhat optimized encoder and putting it in as lib_pypy/_json.py
    -speed up the encoder further

-make getrandbits non-quadratic by adding a method to
pypy/rlib/rbigint.py to generate a bigint from an array of bytes

-speed up bigint->str conversion. Currently it is quite a lot slower
than CPython which has a separate function for converting to a base-10
string.

-speed up long->bytes conversion in pickle module. CPython has
optimized C code for this while the Python version that pypy uses does
some roundabout conversion to hex and then to bytes. Maybe we should
consider making it possible to do this conversion in RPython.

-speed up bigint multiplication

-add a non-moving (from a garbage collection point of view) char
buffer object to RPython. This is very important for I/O among other
things.

-speed up the garbage collector, especially in regard to minor
collections on dicts.

Anyway, that's just a few ideas with a wide range of difficulty. I
believe that there is still work to be done with ctypes and with
regular expressions. Of course, you can look through the bug tracker
(bugs.pypy.org) which is where some of these ideas came from.

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Matthew Kaniaris <mkaniaris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to contribute to pypy.  I've been following the project for a
> while but don't know much about the internals apart from reading the
> docs.  Does anyone have an idea for a good place to start?
>
> -kans
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