first release of PyPy

[Ville Vainio]

>>>>> "Torsten" == Torsten Bronger <bronger at physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:

    Torsten> What's supposed to be compiled?  Only PyPy itself or also
    Torsten> the programs it's "interpreting"?

PyPy is written in python, if it can be compiled then the programs can
be as well.

    Torsten> I've been told by so many books and on-line material that
    Torsten> Python cannot be compiled (unless you cheat).  So how is
    Torsten> this possible?

These guys are exploring a new territory. OTOH, Lisp is a dynamic
language like python and it can be compiled to native code. Pyrex
demonstrates the "trivial" way to compile python to native code, the
real problem is making the resulting code fast. Typically this
requires type inference (i.e. figuring out the type of an object from
the context because there are no type declarations) to avoid dict
lookups in method dispatch.

This is not about PyPy but it might help:

http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/papers/1/paper.pdf

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb