PSF grant for "Shed Skin" to python 3.x?

[Terry Reedy]

On 1/11/2018 4:49 PM, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> Hi folks.
> 
> Is anyone on the list familiar with the process of getting a Python
> Software Foundation grant awarded to a worthy project?  And with
> what's generally considered "worthy"?

The best people to answer that are the grants committee.  Is there 
anything on the site about the form of a grant application?

>  I found
> https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/resolutions/ , but almost all
> of the grants seem to be for conferences, and other "peopley"
> recipients.

There have been a few software grants, I believe in the 5k-10k range.

> But ISTR hearing that PSF grants are available for porting code to Python 3.
> 
> I find Shed Skin, the implicitly-static Python2 -> C++ transpiler
> pretty interesting. Shedskin is at
> https://github.com/shedskin/shedskin
> 
> ISTR that shed skin can be used for entire programs, but probably
> where it really shines is in taking your CPython critical section and
> turning it into an extension module that runs at near-C++ speed with
> minimal tweaking.
> 
> I realize microbenchmarks aren't good indicators of the performance of
> a large, complex software system, but still, the fact that shed skin
> did so well in:
> http://strombrg.blogspot.com/2015/05/python-compared-to-c-machine.html
> ...suggests to me that we don't want it to be a casualty of the move
> from 2.x to 3.x.
> 
> On that microbenchmark at least, shed skin outperformed pypy, cython
> (both manifestly typed and implicitly typed) and numba, and was just
> slightly slower than hand-written C++. Furthermore it appears to be
> the most practical of the handful of Python -> C++ transpilers
> available, other than it still being 2.x-only.
> 
> So my question is: With a suitably written grant proposal and
> reasonable budget, might a PSF grant be available to help the (quite
> busy) author of shedskin, to get it contending with 3.x syntax, 3.x
> semantics and 3.x extension module API?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> PS: I know we could just write a grant and see how it goes, but I'm
> hoping to get a "yes, that's the sort of thing PSF grants are for"
> before we put the time into writing the grant proposal.

Unless you get better information, I suggest a one page summary, 
expanding on the above, with an initial estimate of time/money, asking 
"Can this be considered?  If so, what do you want to see?"  I doubt they 
want the sort of 20+page monstrosity required by the US National Science 
Foundation.


-- 
Terry Jan Reedy