[pypy-dev] EuroPython Talk on Stackless.py and Questions

[Carl Friedrich Bolz]

On 06/02/2010 03:49 PM, Andrew Francis wrote:
> Hi Maciej:
>
> --- On Tue, 6/1/10, Maciej Fijalkowski<fijall at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> Completely not answering your question (I don't know), but
>> clarifying.PyPy has no active developer working on stackless
>> features. However, that does not mean that pypy's priority for
>> stackless features is low. We're definitely going to support
>> developments in that direction (at least those that make sense in
>> our opinion of course :)
>
> I don't know if this clarifies things but my changes have been to
> stackless.py, the API. I added the ability to monitor many channels
> at once, a la Newsqueak/Limbo/Go. This should not break existing code
> (so far it doesn't but I need to write more tests). I also want to
> starting to play with join conditions
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join-calculus) and pattern matching.
>
> However I want to get deeper into PyPy. I would like to implement
> Select as a language feature as an exercise rather than an actual
> change to the language.

What exactly do you mean by "language feature"? I assume that select is 
so far simply a function that lives in stackless.py, right? I don't 
really see what other form select could take, so I also don't see in 
what way you want to change the language.

> I am looking the Javascript and Smalltalk VMs
> but I don't know where to start for Python itself.

The bytecode interpreter and the parser live in interpreter/, the object 
implementations in objspace/std/ and the modules in modules/.

> Also I wouldn't
> mind learning more about the stackless transform.

Again, the stackless transformation doesn't really need to be touched to 
implement select.

Cheers,

Carl Friedrich