PyPy v7.0.0: triple release of 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6-alpha

The PyPy team is proud to release the version 7.0.0 of PyPy, which includes three different interpreters:

• PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7
• PyPy3.5, which supports Python 3.5
• PyPy3.6-alpha: this is the first official release of PyPy to support 3.6 features, although it is still considered alpha quality.

All the interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the triple release.
Until we can work with downstream providers to distribute builds with PyPy, we have made packages for some common packages available as wheels.
The GC hooks , which can be used to gain more insights into its performance, has been improved and it is now possible to manually manage the GC by using a combination of gc.disable and gc.collect_step. See the GC blog post.
We updated the cffi module included in PyPy to version 1.12, and the cppyy backend to 1.4. Please use these to wrap your C and C++ code, respectively, for a JIT friendly experience.
As always, this release is 100% compatible with the previous one and fixed several issues and bugs raised by the growing community of PyPy users. We strongly recommend updating.
The PyPy3.6 release and the Windows PyPy3.5 release are still not production quality so your mileage may vary. There are open issues with incomplete compatibility and c-extension support.
The utf8 branch that changes internal representation of unicode to utf8 did not make it into the release, so there is still more goodness coming. You can download the v7.0 releases here:

http://pypy.org/download.html

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project. If PyPy is not quite good enough for your needs, we are available for direct consulting work.
We would also like to thank our contributors and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, or general help with making RPython's JIT even better.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6. It's fast (PyPy and CPython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.
We also welcome developers of other dynamic languages to see what RPython can do for them.
The PyPy release supports:

• x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD)
• big- and little-endian variants of PPC64 running Linux,
• s390x running Linux

Unfortunately at the moment of writing our ARM buildbots are out of service, so for now we are not releasing any binary for the ARM architecture.

What else is new?

PyPy 6.0 was released in April, 2018. There are many incremental improvements to RPython and PyPy, the complete listing is here.

Please update, and continue to help us make PyPy better.


Cheers, The PyPy team

Düsseldorf Sprint Report 2019

Hello everyone!

We are happy to report a successful and well attended sprint that is wrapping up in Düsseldorf, Germany. In the last week we had eighteen people sprinting at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf on various topics.

Totally serious work going on here constantly.

A big chunk of the sprint was dedicated to various discussions, since we did not manage to gather the core developers in one room in quite a while. Discussion topics included:

• Funding and general sustainability of open source.
• Catching up with CPython 3.7/3.8 – we are planning to release 3.6 some time in the next few months and we will continue working on 3.7/3.8.
• What to do with VMprof
• How can we support Cython inside PyPy in a way that will be understood by the JIT, hence fast.
• The future of supporting the numeric stack on pypy – we have made significant progress in the past few years and most of the numeric stack works out of the box, but deployment and performance remain problems. Improving on those problems remains a very important focus for PyPy as a project.
• Using the presence of a CPython developer (Łukasz Langa) and a Graal Python developer (Tim Felgentreff) we discussed ways to collaborate in order to improve Python ecosystem across implementations.
• Pierre-Yves David and Georges Racinet from octobus gave us an exciting demo on Heptapod, which adds mercurial support to gitlab.
• Maciej and Armin gave demos of their current (non-PyPy-related) project VRSketch.

Visiting the Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord on the break day

Some highlights of the coding tasks worked on:

• Aarch64 (ARM64) JIT backend work has been started, we are able to run the first test! Tobias Oberstein from Crossbar GmbH and Rodolph Perfetta from ARM joined the sprint to help kickstart the project.
• The long running math-improvements branch that was started by Stian Andreassen got merged after bugfixes done by Alexander Schremmer. It should improve operations on large integers.
• The arcane art of necromancy was used to revive long dormant regalloc branch started and nearly finished by Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick. The branch got merged and gives some modest speedups across the board.
• Andrew Lawrence worked on MSI installer for PyPy on windows.
• Łukasz worked on improving failing tests on the PyPy 3.6 branch. He knows very obscure details of CPython (e.g. how pickling works), hence we managed to progress very quickly.
• Matti Picus set up a new benchmarking server for PyPy 3 branches.
• The Utf8 branch, which changes the internal representation of unicode might be finally merged at some point very soon. We discussed and improved upon the last few blockers. It gives significant speedups in a lot of cases handling strings.
• Zlib was missing couple methods, which were added by Ronan Lamy and Julian Berman.
• Manuel Jacob fixed RevDB failures.
• Antonio Cuni and Matti Picus worked on 7.0 release which should happen in a few days.

Now we are all quite exhausted, and are looking forward to catching up on sleep.

Best regards, Maciej Fijałkowski, Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick and the whole PyPy team.