first release of PyPy

[Christian Tismer]

beliavsky at aol.com wrote:

> Kay Schluehr wrote:
> 
>>holger krekel wrote:
>>
>>>Welcome to PyPy 0.6
>>>--------------------
>>>
>>>*The PyPy Development Team is happy to announce the first
>>>public release of PyPy after two years of spare-time and
>>>half a year of EU funded development.  The 0.6 release
>>>is eminently a preview release.*
>>
>>Congratulation to You and Your team!
>>
>>PyPy is really awesome and if it succeeds in speed demands after the
>>translation phase I believe that the project will shift the power
>>within the Python community on the long run.
> 
> 
> Could you please explain this statement? Who will gain power, and who
> will lose it? 

The Python community will gain power, and nobody will loose some.
The big win is that we gain a new flexibility that did not
exist before, even if PyPy should completely miss its speed
promises. Having an extremely flexible implementation in a
very high-level language (which happens to be Python) enables
possibilities which have not been seen, before.

There is of course a chance for some community of C programmers
to loose interest, if PyPy really gets as efficient as we hope
for. But this is a) still a long, uncertain path and b) not
a real danger, but more likely an advantage for the involved people.

> Are you suggesting that CPython and PyPy developers are
> competing?

No idea how we could get onto this track. If there is a competition,
then only if PyPy gets into a position where it is comparable
with CPython. This is not the case, at least not in a well-ordered manner.
It is not really faster, but it is definately much more flexible.
Comparisons are not suitable at all, bcause there are too many
qualities to compare about.

And I see no point for any competition in any future. We all love
Python. It is a language, and languages are communities.
If a particular implementation gets more interest for some reasons,
then because it ibetter s more efficient or more interesting, whatever
reasoning gives it popularity. But we are all with Python!

Surely we are comparing our performance with CPython's. This is
not the real point. Note also, that many of the PyPy team members belong
to CPython core developers, as well. This is not a competition, but
a huge new branch, exploring what is doable and what not.

You might also give our website a try which is quite informative
and gives you an insight into what we are aiming for.

                http://codespeak.net/pypy

PyPy is just a completely new approach to interpreted languages,
almost based upon known compiler technology, but applying this in a
consequent manner, that has no comparable prior example.

I wish to repeat the congratulations to the team for the first release!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

ciao -- chris

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