PyPy/Python at the Maemo summit

Maciej and me visited the Maemo Summit in Berlin - a community meetup around Nokia's Linux based mobile platform. We spontaneously did a lightning talk about a first running pypy-c on Maemo and got nice feedback.

We also had a nice lunch with guys from the INDT in Brazil, including Marcio Marcedo and Marcelo Eduardo. It turns out that Python is used a lot on Maemo, for example the nice Canola UI is done with it. Will be interesting to see how this shapes up in relation to the iPhone and Android.

A lot of Nokia engineers were around and they announced that from October on they are going for weekly new releases of their SDK for the new Fremantle (Maemo-5) debian-based platform until the SDK becomes final - if we got this right.

Funnily enough, we met Marius Gedminas from the Programmers of Vilnius - he gave a lightning talk on his impressions as a community member. We think python programmers really should go much more to non-Python centric conferences.

The whole event took place at the C-Base - was a bit crammed in some of the sessions with something like 200 people attending.
cheers, Maciej and Holger

Pycon UK, Javascript and the GIL

Just got back from Pycon UK 2008 - here are some impressions.

Both the keynote speakers Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical) and Ted Leung (Sun Microsystems) expressed their concerns about Javascript becoming so fast and prominent that it could displace Python in the future. They also highlighted the fact that Multi-core systems get cheaper and more popular also on desktop computers or notebooks. They challenged the community to advance Python implementations to exploit it. Question was up what PyPy can do here. As it stands, PyPy still uses the good old Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) but our approaches should indeed lend itself well to do experimentation with free threading.

During the 2-day conference we met many interesting people, most notably the guys from Resolver, among them William Reade who is working on IronClad -- which implements a fake python25.dll on top of IronPython. He presented some good results for Numpy in his lightning talk. This approach is surely something to follow closely and potentially use for PyPy.

We also had lunch and a couple of chats with Jacob Kaplan-Moss from Django fame - he is apparently up to try use PyPy's sandboxing features for one of his projects, cool!

Conference itself was well organized for the 230 attending people - although the venue might be a bit small for next year's EuroPython. Ah, and we gave three well attended talks, find the slides here:

• PyPy status and 1.1 plans
• PyPy JIT
• py.test tutorial

cheers,
Holger, Maciej, Anto (associated through merlinux, btw)

Düsseldorf PyPy sprint 5-13th October, 2008

The PyPy team is happy to announce the next sprint, which will take place in the Computer Science Department of the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. Sprinting will start on the 6th of October and go on till the 12th. Please arrive on the day before if you want to come.

Topics of the sprint will be aiming at a 1.1 release and to work on integrating PyPy better with small devices. Other topics are also welcome!

We will try to find a hotel with group rates, so if you are interested, please sign up soon! See the announcement for more details.