PyPy 2.4-beta just in time for PSF's funding drive

We're pleased to announce the availability of PyPy 2.4-beta1; faster, fewer bugs, and updated to the python 2.7.8 stdlib.

This release contains several bugfixes and enhancements. Among the user-facing improvements:

• internal refactoring in string and GIL handling which led to significant speedups
• improved handling of multiple objects (like sockets) in long-running programs. They are collected and released more efficiently, reducing memory use. In simpler terms - we closed what looked like a memory leak
• Windows builds now link statically to zlib, expat, bzip, and openssl-1.0.1i
• Many issues were resolved since the 2.3.1 release in June

You can download the PyPy 2.4-beta1 release here http://pypy.org/download.html.

We would like to also point out that in September, the Python Software Foundation will match funds for any donations up to $10k, so head over to our website and help this mostly-volunteer effort out.

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7 and 3.2.5. It's fast (pypy 2.4 and cpython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64, Windows, and OpenBSD, as well as newer ARM hardware (ARMv6 or ARMv7, with VFPv3) running Linux. 
We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project.

The complete release notice is here.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. We especially welcome success stories, please tell us about how it has helped you!

Cheers, The PyPy Team

News Flash from the beta release cycle:

• Note that the beta release mistakenly identifies itself in sys.pypy_version_info as releaselevel=='final', please do not mistake this for a final version
• The beta can hit a "Illegal instruction" exception in jitted code on ARMv6 processors like the RaspberryPi. This will be fixed for the release.