Future of Pypy?

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 22 Feb 2015 11:02:29 -0800, Paul Rubin writes:
>Laura Creighton <lac at openend.se> writes:
>> Because one thing we do know is that people who are completely and
>> utterly ignorant about whether having multiple cores will improve
>> their code still want to use a language that lets them use the
>> multiple processors.  If the TM dream of having that just happen,
>> seemlessly (again, no promises) is proven to be true, well ....  we
>> think that the hordes will suddenly be interested in PyPy.
>
>TM is a useful feature but it's unlikely to be the thing that attracts
>"the hordes".  More important is to eliminate the GIL and hopefully have
>lightweight (green) threads that can still run on multiple cores, like
>in GHC and Erlang.  Having them communicate by mailboxes/queues is
>sufficient most of the time, and in Erlang it's the only method allowed
>in theory (there are some optimizations taking place behind the scenes).
>TM hasn't gotten that much uptake in GHC (one of the earliest HLL
>implementations of TM) in part because its performance cost is
>significant when there's contention.  I wonder if Clojure programmers
>use it more.

The GIL isn't going away from PyPy any time real soon, alas.  Armin has
some pretty cool ideas about what to do about contention, but if
you want to hear them, its better if you go post that to pypy-dev at python.org
so you can get it from the man directly rather that hearing my
paraphrase.  Or ask away on the #pypy channel on freenode ...

But this reminds me that I have to get Lennart Augustsson and Armin
Rigo in the same room some time.  Should be fun.

Laura