[pypy-commit] extradoc extradoc: (arigo, fijal) za sprint report

[fijal]

Author: Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com>
Branch: extradoc
Changeset: r4893:6cc82be4f16e
Date: 2012-10-23 12:14 +0200
http://bitbucket.org/pypy/extradoc/changeset/6cc82be4f16e/

Log:	(arigo, fijal) za sprint report

diff --git a/blog/draft/za-sprint-report.rst b/blog/draft/za-sprint-report.rst
new file mode 100644
--- /dev/null
+++ b/blog/draft/za-sprint-report.rst
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+Hello.
+
+We're about to finish a PyPy sprint in Cape Town, South Africa that was
+one of the smallest done so far, only having Armin Rigo and Maciej Fijalkowski
+with Alex Gaynor joining briefly at the beginning, however also one of the
+longest, lasting almost 3 weeks. The sprint theme seems to be predominantly
+"no new features" and "spring cleaning". We overall removed about 20k lines
+of code in the PyPy source tree. The breakdown of things done and worked on:
+
+* We killed `SomeObject` support in annotation and rtyper. This is a modest
+  code saving, however, it reduces the complexity of RPython and also,
+  hopefully, improves compile errors from RPython. We're far from done
+  on the path to have comprehensible compile-time errors, but the first
+  step is always the hardest :)
+
+* We killed some magic in specifying the interface between builtin functions
+  and Python code. It used to be possible to write builtin functions like this::
+
+    def f(space, w_x='xyz'):
+
+  which will magically wrap `'xyz'` into a W_StringObject. Right now, instead,
+  you have to write::
+
+    @unwrap_spec(w_x=WrappedDefault('xyz'))
+    def f(space, w_x):
+
+  which is more verbose, but less magical.
+
+* We killed the `CExtModuleBuilder` which is the last remaining part of
+  infamous extension compiler that could in theory build C extensions
+  for CPython in RPython. This was never working very well and the main
+  part was killed long ago.
+
+* We killed various code duplications in the C backend.
+
+* We killed `microbench` and a bunch of other small-to-medium unused
+  directories.
+
+* We killed llgraph JIT backend and rewrote it from scratch. Now the llgraph
+  backend is not translatable, but this feature was rarely used and caused
+  a great deal of complexity.
+
+* We progressed on `continulet-jit-3` branch, up to the point of merging
+  it into `result-in-resops` branch, which also has seen a bit of progress.
+
+  Purpose of those two branches:
+
+  * `continulet-jit-3`: enable stackless to interact with the JIT by killing
+    global state while resuming from the JIT into the interpreter. This has
+    multiple benefits. For example it's one of the stones on the path to
+    enable STM for PyPy. It also opens new possibilities for other optimizations
+    including Python-Python calls and generators.
+
+  * `result-in-resops`: the main goal is to speed up the tracing time of PyPy.
+    We found out the majority of time is spent in the optimizer chain,
+    which faces an almost complete rewrite. It also simplifies the storage
+    of the operations as well as the number of implicit invariants that have
+    to be kept in mind while developing.
+
+* We finished and merged the excellent work by Ronan Lamy which makes the
+  flow object space (used for abstract interpretation during RPython
+  compilation) independent from the Python interpreter. This means
+  we've achieved an important milestone on the path of separating the RPython
+  translation toolchain from the PyPy Python interpreter.
+
+Cheers,
+fijal & armin
+
+  
+