[pypy-dev] Helping with STM at the PyCon 2013 (Santa Clara) sprints

[Taavi Burns]

>From a recent email of Armin's to the list:
> The STM project progressed slowly during the last few months.  The
> status right now is:
>
> * Most importantly, missing major Garbage Collection cycles, which
> means pypy-stm slowly but constantly leaks memory.
>
> * The JIT integration is not finished; so far pypy-stm can only be
> compiled without the JIT.
>
> * There are also other places where the performance can be improved,
> probably a lot.
>
> * Finally there are a number of usability concerns that we (or mostly
> Remi) worked on recently.  The main issues turn around the idea that,
> as a user of pypy-stm, you should have a way to get freeback on the
> process.  For example right now, transactions that abort are
> completely transparent --- to the point that you don't have any way to
> know that it occurred, apart from "it runs too slowly" if it occurs a
> lot.  You should have a way to get Python tracebacks of aborts if you
> want to.  A similar issue is "inevitable" transactions.

I'm interested in helping with STM:
1) I think STM is really interesting, particularly Armin's take on it
2) I need a "Personal Development Goal" for %(dayjob)s. Last year it
was just "Contribute to PyPy", which I did at the sprints (a bit).
This year, I'd like to try something a bit more ambitious. ;)

>From the list above, are there any particular areas (tickets?) that
would be a good starting place for me to look at? I expect that to get
the most out of the sprints, I should do a bit of pre-work (reading at
least, if not poking).

Thanks!

--
taa
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