Sunday, March 24, 2019

PyPy v7.1 released; now uses utf-8 internally for unicode strings

The PyPy team is proud to release version 7.1.0 of PyPy, which includes two different interpreters:
  • PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7
  • PyPy3.6-beta: this is the second official release of PyPy to support 3.6 features, although it is still considered beta quality.
The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the double release.

This release, coming fast on the heels of 7.0 in February, finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Removing the conversions from strings to unicode internally lead to a nice speed bump. We merged the utf-8 changes to the py3.5 branch (Python3.5.3) but will concentrate on 3.6 going forward.

We also improved the ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays.

The CFFI backend has been updated to version 1.12.2. We recommend using CFFI rather than c-extensions to interact with C, and cppyy for interacting with C++ code.
 You can download the v7.1 releases here:
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, 3.6. 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.
This 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
  •  ARM32 although we do not supply downloadable binaries at this time
  • s390x running Linux

What else is new?

PyPy 7.0 was released in February, 2019. There are many incremental improvements to RPython and PyPy, for more information see the changelog.

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


Cheers, The PyPy team