[Python-Dev] PyPy 1.7 - widening the sweet spot

[Brett Cannon]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 12:37, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Nov 2011 12:37:59 -0500
> Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 07:46, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 10:20 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com
> >
> > > wrote:
> > > > The problem is not with maintaining the modified directory. The
> > > > problem was always things like changing interface between the C
> > > > version and the Python version or introduction of new stuff that does
> > > > not run on pypy because it relies on refcounting. I don't see how
> > > > having a subrepo helps here.
> > >
> > > Indeed, the main thing that can help on this front is to get more
> > > modules to the same state as heapq, io, datetime (and perhaps a few
> > > others that have slipped my mind) where the CPython repo actually
> > > contains both C and Python implementations and the test suite
> > > exercises both to make sure their interfaces remain suitably
> > > consistent (even though, during normal operation, CPython users will
> > > only ever hit the C accelerated version).
> > >
> > > This not only helps other implementations (by keeping a Python version
> > > of the module continuously up to date with any semantic changes), but
> > > can help people that are porting CPython to new platforms: the C
> > > extension modules are far more likely to break in that situation than
> > > the pure Python equivalents, and a relatively slow fallback is often
> > > going to be better than no fallback at all. (Note that ctypes based
> > > pure Python modules *aren't* particularly useful for this purpose,
> > > though - due to the libffi dependency, ctypes is one of the extension
> > > modules most likely to break when porting).
> > >
> >
> > And the other reason I plan to see this through before I die
>
> Uh! Any bad news? :/



Sorry, turn of phrase in English which didn't translate well. I just meant
"when I get to it, which could quite possibly be a *long* time from
now". This year has been absolutely insane for me personally (if people
care, the details are shared on Google+ or you can just ask me), so I am
just not promising anything for Python on a short timescale (although I'm
still hoping the final details for bootstrapping importlib won't be
difficult to work out so I can meet a personal deadline of PyCon).
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