[pypy-dev] http://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/wiki/ProjectPlan

[Stefan Behnel]

Maciej Fijalkowski wrote:
> I'm completely not up to argue,

Sure, fine with me. I'm actually happy the PyPy project is there. It gives
us both competition and inspiration (although I do think that there is some
space left for broader discussions...).


> but cython is effectively a compiler right?

Yes.


> (which means you cannot just run it - you need to compile it
> first and wait).

Worse than that: you have to push your code through Cython, a C compiler, a
linker, and then call into CPython to load the module. :-]

BTW, the bottleneck in this pipeline is really the C compiler. Cython
itself is pretty fast, especially when its parser is compiled to a C
extension (Cython bootstraps parts of itself to C now).


> I expect jit to be a little more transparent than that.

Luckily, we have a CPython import hook (pyximport) that does all of these
things for you, so it's /almost/ like a JIT. It already works for a couple
of stdlib modules, for example.


> btw - does cython support all of the python language or just a subset

Almost. Complete Python language support is a 1.0 goal. (no clear Python
version target, we support a wild mix of Py2.x and 3.0 features today)

Currently, there is a bit of work left to finish up closures, so we still
can't do inner functions/classes, generators and friends. That's more a
question of manpower than a real technical issue, though. Many developers
are more interested in generating fast C code and fast interfaces to
external libraries (C/Fortran), than in supporting all of the Python language.

Stefan