[pypy-dev] Project suggestions

[Aurélien Campéas]

Hello, pypy people,

Armin Rigo a écrit :
> Hi Boria,
> 
> We are indeed starting to think about more focused research areas in
> PyPy.  For example, along these lines, we will need more work on
> compiler optimizations and generation of code for various architectures,
> both either statically or just-in-time.  More along the lines of
> interpreters and virtual machines, we could start investigating new
> aspects that would be useful to code into the interpreter or the
> translation process: continuations, persistence (either dumping a
> whole-process image or something more fine-grained), security (running
> code in a sandbox), and much more, all of which is hinted at in some
> documentation on Codespeak.  Finally, there is also the idea of
> supporting other dynamic languages than Python by writing an interpreter
> for them in PyPy.

I have been looking into pypy for a few days, and trying to understand 
how to make the Lisp backend work.

I now understand that due to pypy heavily layered nature, it is possible 
   to use a language like lisp, as a target, at different levels. For 
instance, bytecode interpreter (by providing a proper set of functions 
to handle the bytecodes ?), or compiler (by translating the function 
graph into low-level lisp). Right now, I am sticking with the second 
way, as it was started in gencl.py

(btw, one question that is not clear to me is about the function graph : 
does it contain python or rpython opcodes ?)

I am also thinking about another possibility (wrt your last sentence) : 
translating directly the parse tree into high-level lisp. Maybe this 
idea is nonsense. In fact, the distance from de-sugared python to the 
opcode is unknown to me (even though I suspect there is no 1:1 mapping 
between the two). Whatever, that could be the start of a strategy to 
translate python towards other high-level languages (ruby, or js as in 
the other thread) without paying the full price of opcode interpretation 
in the target (that is : parts which are semantically similar could be 
easily translated, others would be -costily- emulated).

Thoughts ? (aka : does it look like gibberish ?)

Thanks,
Aurélien.