what's the point of rpython?

[Brendan Miller]

>> The goals of the pypy project seems to be to create a fast python
>> implementation. I may be wrong about this, as the goals seem a little
>> amorphous if you look at their home page.
>
> The home page itself is ambiguous, and does oversell the performance
> aspect. The *actual* goal as outlined by their official docs is to
> implement Python in Python, at every level.

Ok fair enough. In some ways I see that as more of a purely
intellectual exercise than the practical endeavor that I assumed the
project was originally.

However, one of the links I was sent had one of the devs talking about
using the translation process to make C/Java/LLVM implementations out
of the same interpreter code. I'll say that makes a lot of sense.

Another question I was wondering about is whether they plan on
maintaining good C bindings? Will existing bindings for third party
libraries be able to work?

Also, are they going to do away with the GIL? The python devs seem to
consider the GIL a non-issue, though they may change their mind in 3
years when we all have 32 core desktops, until then getting rid of the
GIL would make pypy pretty attractive in some quarters. I know the
scons project was running into GIL issues.

Finally, I'm pretty unclear on what versions of python that pypy is targeting.