PyPy "Berlin" sprint (29th Sep - 4th Oct 2003)

holger krekel hpk@trillke.net
Mon, 8 Sep 2003 00:50:00 +0200


hello python developers, 

the fourth PyPy coding sprint will take place in Berlin (Germany) from

    (morning of) 29th of September to (evening of) 4th of October 2003. 

All Python developers are welcome to join the sprint. 
See below for participation details. 


What is PyPy?
-------------

PyPy is a remimplementation of Python in the Python language itself. 
Simplicity and flexibilty are the foremost goals.  With PyPy we want it
to be easy to extend the language or generate a more minimal language 
implementation.

One key technique to making this feasible is to specialize our abstract/general 
PyPy-Python implementation into native code (e.g. C-code).  Eventually the
concepts of PSYCO and Stackless are to be integrated into PyPy. 

There is, of course, much more to it so feel free to consult some
documents especially our Oscon-2003 paper on this page:

    http://codespeak.net/pypy/index.cgi?doc

We know that many areas and issues are still somewhat vague
although PyPy can already run many python programs [*]. Fortunately, Python 
is pretty tolerant about expressing ideas in vague ways.  After all, 
hacking at PyPy aims (and already proved!) to preserve the fun of 
hacking in Python. 


History, status and Berlin goals
--------------------------------

The project started in Jan/Feb 2003 with an initiative from Christian 
Tismer, Holger Krekel and Armin Rigo. During the course many more
developers joined our sprints and there are now between 5 and 15 people
involved in developing PyPy.  

The three sprints resulted in a fully working interpreter, some development 
infrastructure and the "standard object space" which is an abstraction for 
operations on standard (CPython) objects. 

There is no public release yet, you more or less have to install
a subversion-client and checkout the trunk.  Here is our 'howtosvn' 
which contains up-to-date clients for multiple platforms along
with some instructions how to get started:

    http://codespeak.net/pypy/index.cgi?doc/devel/howtosvn.html

Main goals for the Berlin sprint are 

- integration/enhancement of a Python parser and the compiler package 

- generating native code from our Python interpreter/types implementations

- enhancing/correcting/completing what we have (various tasks)


How to participate in Berlin (29th of Sept. to 4th of October)
--------------------------------------------------------------

If you are interested to participate please subscribe at our 
sprint organization list 

    http://codespeak.net/mailman/pypy-sprint

and please list yourself at 

    http://codespeak.net/moin/pypy/moin.cgi/SprintAttendants

so that we can organize accomodation and arrange details. Costs
should be pretty low (except from travelling costs, of course).
Currently nine people are scheduled to come.  

Btw, the sprint starts early on the 29th of september so it's best to
arrive on sunday, 28th. Also we probably want to have one day
off during the sprint week to do some sight (or cafe+pub) seeing. 
Actually it's much better to participate the whole week to better
get into it. 

cheers,

    holger 
    

[*] and currently only 20-40 thousand times slower than CPython! which clearly 
    shows that we are successfully follow the "premature optimization is the root 
    of all evil" maxime.