Py3k status update #8

This is the eight status update about our work on the py3k branch, which
we can work on thanks to all of the people who donated to the py3k
proposal.

Just a short update on November's work: we're now passing about 194 of
approximately 355 modules of CPython's regression test suite, up from passing
160 last month. Many test modules only fail a small number of individual tests
now.

We'd like to thank Amaury Forgeot d'Arc for his contributions, in particular he
has made significant progress on updating CPyExt for Python 3 this month.

Some other highlights:

• test_marshal now passes, and there's been significant progress on
  pickling (thanks Kenny Levinsen and Amaury for implementing
  int.{to,from}_bytes)
• We now have a _posixsubprocess module
• More encoding related fixes, which affects many failing tests
• _sre was updated and now test_re almost passes
• Exception behavior is almost complete per the Python 3 specs, what's mostly
  missing now are the new __context__ and __traceback__ attributes (PEP
  3134)
• Fixed some crashes and deadlocks occurring during the regression tests
• We merged the unicode-strategies branch both to default and to py3k: now we
  have versions of lists, dictionaries and sets specialized for unicode
  elements, as we already had for strings.
• However, for string-specialized containers are still faster in some cases
  because there are shortcuts which have not been implemented for unicode yet
  (e.g., constructing a set of strings from a list of strings). The plan is to
  completely kill the shortcuts and improve the JIT to produce the fast
  version automatically for both the string and unicode versions, to have a
  more maintainable codebase without sacrificing the speed. The autoreds
  branch (already merged) was a first step in this direction.

cheers,
Philip&Antonio