Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Py3k for PyPy fundraiser

Hi,

We would like to announce a donation campaign for implementing Python 3 in PyPy.
Please read our detailed plan for all the details and donate using the
button on that page!

Thanks,
The PyPy Team

21 comments:

stan said...

Two comments:

1. It would be really nice to see a semi-frequently updated progress bar (live is best) with # of dollars and # of contributions for the fundraising.

Part of the excitement created by sites like Kickstarter (and the Humble Indie Bundle and so on) is seeing how your small contribution adds to the whole. A donate button feels more like throwing your money into a dark hole (a very reasonable and worthwhile hole, but a hole nonetheless). Take advantage of some video game psychology and give us that "level up" feedback when we contribute! :)

2. I know you don't want to oversubscribe yourselves, but would you consider doing a similar funding drive for Numpy support? PLEASE???

Konstantine Rybnikov said...

Totally agree with stan about progress bar. Recent novacut's donation campaign showed importance of that a lot (since people saw that they need to hurry up with fundings and did lots of them in last couple of days).

Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick said...

@stan: 1. progress bar will be coming soon

2. we are actively working on putting up an equivalent page for Numpy support.

stan said...

Awesome! I want to be first in line to pitch $50 into the Numpy jar.

Anonymous said...

Awesome! Infact I regard Python 3 as much more important as any other features you could add now. 10% more performance is not nearly in the same league as Python3 support. Will happily spend some money on this.

João Bernardo said...

Great!! I was waiting for that

Anonymous said...

For complete support thats like 200,000$. I understand it's a willing feature, but I don't think the pypy community and followers are that huge.

Btw, nice getting all the benchmarks above CPython 2.6 :)

Sojin said...

Great work guys! I think keeping this amazing project alive is important for the Python eco-system... Here comes my $$.

Laurent said...

I've heard that Py3K support for PyPy will be implemented in Python 2.X anyway. Is that true?

Antonio Cuni said...

@Laurent: to be more precise, py3k will be implemented in RPython, which is indeed a subset of Python 2.

Right now we don't have any plan to port RPython to Python 3: it's not a priority and it won't give any advantage to the PyPy end users.

Anonymous said...

cpython3 is a fork of cpython2, but here you intend to support both versions with the same codebase. Does not this make the task much harder, and peeking into cpython3 code for guidance less useful? Also, isn't it possible that the resulting large set of switch (PYVERSION) {} statements will make the code less readable and maintainable?

Anyway, I have full faith in your assessment of the best approach, but I am still interested in your explanation. :)

Zinahe said...

Just made my donation. GOD SPEED.

I second stan's idea of providing a progress bar showing the overall status of the fundraising.

Harald Armin Massa said...

a) please, please get the pages lac showed in her lightning talk at pycon.uk online.
- There are pictures of people in it, and it is easier to donate to people then to something abstract
- there is text what happened
- there is text that anonymous donation is possible

b) please, work on the feedback. It is CRUCIAL to show the actual state. Giving 5€ and nothing happens is dull. Giving 5€ and a number goes up - good. Giving 500€ and a rendered bar moves a pixel - awesome!

c) I found the Python3PyPy fundraiser easily. I did not find the numpypy fundraiser. Please, put lacs pages up :) if I can vote for them somewhere, please let me know.

Maciej Fijalkowski said...

@Harald poke lac harder so she deploys it :)

Anonymous said...

It's been a couple of weeks and the progress bar still isn't there. Although there is a link for it that doesn't work.
Please fix this and make it visible without having to click anything.

Anonymous said...

Hi! Please create the same kind of bucket for numpy support. I'm a big fan of Py3k, but I'm an even bigger fan of numpy - and I need it for my work. I'll donate to Py3k now, but I'll donate a bigger sum to both when I see the new bucket.

Maciej Fijalkowski said...

We're waiting for the final ok of the proposal so it can be said it benefits the public good. Any day now :)

Stefan M said...

* Who needs Python 3 support??? *

It looks like the PyPy project is adding things just to improve something and keep doing something but for who's sake?

I really need is proper support for C extensions. Without it, people who use Python professionally like myself, cannot switch to PyPy and we are stuck with Cython and/or Psyco.

Who steers the development of Pypy and why would these people refuse to realize what hinders thousands of developers, who would love to use Pypy to make the switch from CPython ???

Please tell me which real software projects use PyPy and for what reason they would need Py3K support!


Go ahead and add more language constructs that you can use to run academic programs even faster and keep ignoring what is really necessary to push Pypy into day-to-day usability

(* frustrated *)

Maciej Fijalkowski said...

Hi Stefan. There is noone who steers direction in PyPy. Since this is open source, people either work on what they like, because it's fun or scratches their itch. Note that Python 3 work is something that people expressed interest in funding -- if they fund it enough, why wouldn't developers work on it? It's more interesting than most jobs.

With regard to C extensions - it's good enough for many people, like quora to run on PyPy. Improving the support is boring and frustrating, so I don't think anyone would be willing to invest significant amount of his *free time* into that. However, feel free to speak with your money, you know how to find me.

Cheers,
fijal

Stefan M said...

Hi Maciej,

I realize that I came across in a somewhat obnoxious way. Sorry for that - I simply did not realize that PyPy is a true hobbyist project (at least currently).
I wish I could contribute funding but though I am using Python a lot at work, we are a National Lab and struggling to keep our government funding ourselves.

I hope a deep-pocket corporate will fund the Numpy development

Cheers, Stefan

Anonymous said...

i wonder why you don't get (more) funding from google?

you seem to have reached the goal of unladen swallow now and there still is room for improvement.

and it would be peanuts for them anyway. :)