[pypy-dev] pypy on Tim Bray's blog

[David Cournapeau]

Carl Friedrich Bolz wrote:
> Hi Martijn,
>
> let me first note that I agree with a lot of your points, when not
> taking the financial side of things into account. I will ignore the
> financial side of things in this mail (since I don't think anybody
> proposes to focus on something completely different than our Python
> interpreter _without_ major financial incentives).
>
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
> [snip]
>  > Again, I'm not trying to criticize what the project has already done.
>  > I'm trying to be a voice of pragmatism and the voice of a potential open
>  > source end-user. Listen to me if you like; it's not an enemy voice.
>  > There are two PyPy technologies that I can see that are close to
>  > pragmatic fruition now:
>  >
>  > * writing CPython modules in RPython (I completely lost track of what
>  > the state of this is since there have been a lot of changes)
>
> It's still working but mostly accidentally. It needs some rethinking and
> a rewrite. We have now better machinery and also ideas how to make it
> really fast, but it's a manpower problem.  There isn't anyone interested
> enough in supporting this in the current PyPy team. If somebody outside
> the current PyPy-team really wanted this and were willing to work on it
> we (or at least me personally) would give him all the support we can.
Sorry for jumping in, and I hope this is not too OT, but what is missing 
for a 'real' CPython alternative ?
    - some bits of the standard library: how much ? Can this be worked 
on by people 'outside pypy' (by outside, I mean people who know python, 
who are willing to learn rpython, but who cannot work on the whole 
translation/gc/JIT/whatever because they are not smart enough, someone 
like me :) )
    - some language constructs (my understanding is that the current 
language supported is python2.4 ?) ?
    - implementation problems (some things too slow, not backward 
compatible) ?

cheers,

David