Using Tkinter and IDLE with PyPy

We are pleased to announce that Tkinter, the GUI library based on TCL/TK, now works with PyPy.
Tkinter is composed of two parts:

• _tkinter, a module written in C which interfaces with the TCL world
• Tkinter, a pure Python package which wraps _tkinter to expose the pythonic API we are used to

The PyPy version of _tkinter reuses the C code of as found in CPython and compile it through the PyPy C-API compatibility layer, cpyext. To make it work with PyPy, we had to modify it slightly, in order to remove the dependency on some API functions which are not supported by PyPy. In particular, we removed the dependency on the PyOS_InputHook variable, which allows a nice integration of Tkinter and the Python interactive prompt: the result is that, unlike CPython, in PyPy Tk windows created at the interactive prompt are not shown until we manually call the mainloop method. Apart from this inconvenience, all the rest works fine.
At the moment, _tkinter is not distributed with PyPy because our build system does not support automatic compilation of C extension. Instead, it is necessary to install it manually, either directly from source or by easy_installing/pip installing tkinter-pypy from PyPI.
For everything to work correctly, you need a recent build of PyPy: the following is a step-by-step guide to install _tkinter in a PyPy nightly build for Linux 64 bit; for other architectures, look at the nightly build page:

$ wget http://buildbot.pypy.org/nightly/trunk/pypy-c-jit-43485-1615dfd7d8f1-linux64.tar.bz2

$ tar xfv pypy-c-jit-43485-1615dfd7d8f1-linux64.tar.bz2

$ cd pypy-c-jit-43485-1615dfd7d8f1-linux64/

$ wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

$ ./bin/pypy ez_setup.py    # install setuptools

$ ./bin/easy_install tkinter-pypy

Once you complete the steps above, you can start using Tkinter from your python programs. In particular, you can use IDLE, the IDE which is part of the Python standard library. To start IDLE, type:

$ ./bin/pypy -m idlelib.idle

Have fun :-)