Last year was quite successful for PyPy fundraising through the Software Freedom Conservancy, and Conservancy and PyPy are very excited to announce that enough was raised to begin the first stages on the Py3k and Numpy grant proposals.
As of the end of 2011, 135 different individuals gave to the Py3k campaign, and 114 to the Numpy campaign. We thank each of you who donated to help make this work possible. Meanwhile, if you haven't given to support these projects, we do hope you'll give generously now to help fund their second stages later this year!
We're also particularly excited that a few donors gave particularly large donations to support this work; those big donations really filled in the gap to help us get started!
Specifically, we're pleased to announce that Google donated $35000 towards implementing Python 3 in PyPy. Google's general support of the Python community is well known, and their specific support of our grant proposal is much appreciated.
Meanwhile, Numpy was supported in part by contributions from Nate Lawson, Cantab Capital Partners, and Getco, as well as more than a hundred other contributors.
With these donations combined with many others, we're now starting work on both projects. This week, the Conservancy signed contracts with Antonio Cuni and Benjamin Peterson to work towards the Stage 1.1 goals in Py3k proposal (and is negotiating for another contractor as well), and with Maciej Fijałkowski to work towards the Stage 1 goals in the Numpy proposal.
In 2012, PyPy will continue regular sprint meetings, at which Py3K and Numpy efforts will certainly have a place. We have some limited funds to fund travels of contributors to those meetings.
We're very thankful for all who donated so far to support these efforts, and we hope that now that work has begun, even more donors will come forward to help us finish the job. In the meantime, watch for the commits showing up from these developers and other contributors in the PyPy repositories!
Cheers, The PyPy Team
It seems strange to me that Amaury Forgeot d'Arc wasn't the first one to be contracted for working on Py3k support. From the commit messages, he seems to have done most of the work in the py3k branch so far, or is he the unnamed third contractor?
ReplyDeleteWhat about a Py2k8, is there any hope? Will at least 2.7 still be supported?
ReplyDelete@Gaëtan: The reason is simple: I already have a regular day job, 40 hours a week, and I cannot have another remuneration without consent of my employer.
ReplyDeleteActually I started the py3k branch before the funding proposal, and even before that I've been trying different ways to do the transition from str to unicode.
Then, my understanding of the JIT and other optimizations is very poor. And there are important changes to do around the representation of unicode for example, or the int/long unification, if we want pypy3k to be as fast as 2.7.
I am quite happy of the current state: some people are paid to do and finish the real job, and volunteers can have fun and help in some parts, working on the most interesting project around Python.
@Anonymous: there won't be any Python 2.8 (search for PEP404 for the reasons), but as stated in the py3k grant proposal: http://pypy.org/py3donate.html
ReplyDelete"The goal of the PyPy community is to support both Python 2 and Python 3 for the forseeable future"