Friday, January 25, 2008

Buildbots and Better Platform Support

In the last days we improved platform-support of PyPy's Python interpreter. Jean-Paul Calderone has been tirelessly working for some time now on setting up a buildbot for translating and testing PyPy. So far the basic mechanisms are working and the buildbot is running on various machines, including some that Michael Schneider (bigdog) lets us use, one of them being a Windows machine, the other one with a 64bit Linux (lots of thanks to those two, you are awesome!).

What is still missing is a nice way to visualize the test results to quickly see which tests have started failing on which platforms. There is a prototype already, which still needs some tweaking.

The availability of these machines has triggered some much-needed bug-fixing in PyPy to make our Python interpreter work better on Windows and on 64 bit Linux. Maciek and Michael Schneider worked on this quite a bit last week, with the result that PyPy supports many more extension modules now on Windows and 64 bit Linux. Since we now have the buildbot the hope is that the support also won't disappear soon :-).

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Cool
I just found your blog and now I am going to read it every day:)
I love reading about the progress you guys are making on PyPy.