Thursday, June 26, 2008

Funding of some recent progress by Google's Open Source Programs

As readers of this blog already know, PyPy development has recently focused on getting the code base to a more usable state. One of the most important parts of this work was creating an implementation of the ctypes module for PyPy, which provides a realistic way to interface with external libraries. The module is now fairly complete (if somewhat slow), and has generated a great deal of community interest. One of the main reasons this work progressed so well was that we received funding from Google's Open Source Programs Office. This is really fantastic for us, and we cannot thank Google and Guido enough for helping PyPy progress more rapidly than we could have with volunteer-only time!

This funding opportunity arose from the PyPy US road trip at the end of last year, which included a visit to Google. You can check out the video of the talk we gave during our visit. We wrapped up our day with discussions about the possibility of Google funding some PyPy work and soon after a we were at work on the proposal for improvements we'd submitted.

One nice side-effect of the funding is indeed that we can use some of the money for funding travels of contributors to our sprint meetings. The next scheduled Google funding proposal also aims at making our Python interpreter more usable and compliant with CPython. This will be done by trying to fully run Django on top of PyPy. With more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008.

Many thanks to the teams at merlinux and Open End for making this development possible, including Carl Friedrich Bolz, Antonio Cuni, Holger Krekel, Maciek Fijalkowski at merlinux, Samuele Pedroni and yours truly at Open End.

We always love to hear feedback from the community, and you can get the latest word on our development and let us know your thoughts here in the comments.

Bea Düring, Open End AB

PS: Thanks Carl Friedrich Bolz for drafting this post.

9 comments:

  1. congratulations! that's awesome.

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  3. That's great! I like that this project is getting bigger, growing faster :)
    I wish I could help, but don't know where to start :-[

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  4. I've been hard on Guido in the past for not throwing more support behind PyPy, and I'm very glad now to hear that Guido (and Google) are demonstrating its importance. Thanks all.

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  5. Wow, I am actually more excited by hearing that pypy will be a partial cpython replacement this year than by the google money. Pypy is the most interesting project going on right now in the python world.

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  6. Wow, this should be quite interesting.

    JT
    http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

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  7. Congrats. I'm very glad to keep hearing about efforts to make PyPy usable with real-world applications and frameworks. The PyPy project is starting to send out positive signals, and this is something I've been waiting for.

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  8. "With more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008."

    Out of curiousity, are there good reasons for anyone to want to do that?

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See also PyPy's IRC channel: #pypy at freenode.net, or the pypy-dev mailing list.
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