Release of PyPy 0.7.0

[Valentino Volonghi aka Dialtone]

Michael Sparks <ms at cerenity.org> wrote:

> Would it be useful for people to start trying out their modules/code to see
> if they work with this release, and whether they can likewise be translated
> using the C/LLVM backends, or would you say this is too early? (I'm more
> thinking in terms of it providing real world usecases in the hope of
> finding things that don't work - rather than anything else)

This is not how it works. Pypy doesn't translate your code to C/LLVM. 
Currently PyPy can only translate a pretty simple subset of python
called RPython which has a very C-like syntax (but without memory
management code). This is needed to allow type inference inside the
interpreter code.

The code in your application is application code and can be whatever you
want, you may try to translate it to C/LLVM but it won't be that good of
course because the annotator is not that intelligent.

Just In Time compilation a-la-psyco is planned before the 1.0 release of
pypy. 
Right now also the compiler/parser run in application level which means
it is rather slow because it is not translated like the rest of pypy
(which accounts for quite a bit of the slowness of the translated pypy)
[this is of course only true if they didn't manage to rewrite the
parser/compiler in RPython, which I admit I'm not sure]

More information is available on codespeak.net website :).

What's really cool in PyPy is how easily you can implement a new object
space and change semantics of operations done in python.
Writing a Python interpreter that can share data structures across many
computers will be hard but possible.
There are already 4 different object spaces implemented, the standard
one, the thunk one (which is a lazy evaluation object space), the
flowgraph object space and the trace object space that traces each
operation done.

> Either way, this looks like a great milestone - congratulations to the
> entire team. (I remember PyPy being met with skepticism as to whether
> it could even be done! :-)

Indeed.

-- 
Valentino Volonghi aka Dialtone
Now Running MacOSX 10.4
Blog: http://vvolonghi.blogspot.com
http://weever.berlios.de