Thursday, December 17, 2009

Planning a next release of PyPy

The PyPy core team is planning to make a new release before the next Pycon US.

The main target of the 1.2 release is packaging the good results we have achieved applying our current JIT compiler generator to our Python interpreter. Some of that progress has been chronicled in recent posts on the status blog. By releasing them in a relatively stable prototype we want to encourage people to try them with their own code and to gather feedback in this way. By construction the JIT compiler should support all Python features, what may vary are the speedups achieved (in some cases the JIT may produce worse results than the PyPy interpreter which we would like to know) and the extra memory required by it.

For the 1.2 release we will focus on the JIT stability first, less on improving non-strictly JIT areas. The JIT should be good at many things as shown by previous blog postings. We want the JIT compiler in the release to work well on Intel 32 bits on Linux, with Mac OS X and Windows being secondary targets. Which compilation targets work will depend a bit on contributions.

In order to finalize the release we intend to have a concentrated effort ("virtual sprint") from the 22nd to the 29th of January. Coordination will happen as usual through the #pypy irc channel on freenode. Samuele Pedroni will take the role of release manager as he already did in the past.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good News!
Can't wait to try pypy as my standard python vm on my desktop machine.

Btw: Are there any plans yet for python generators support in the jit?
Because thats the only feature that I'm currently missing when using pypy.
I have some medium sized apps, that I'd like to try, but they often use generators, so these will be slower with jit than without, won't they?

Maciej Fijalkowski said...

@Anonymous.

Generators won't be sped up by JIT. This does not mean that JIT can't run or can't speed up other parts of your program. And yes, there are plans of supporting that.

Cheers,
fijal

servo said...

I want to get involved in the development of PyPy, but I'm just a student with some experience with compilers. There's any list of junior contributions that can be done by somebody starting?

Thanks!

Maciej Fijalkowski said...

@servo

Show on #pypy on freenode IRC. We'll find you something, don't worry :-)