Berlin Sprint Finished

The Berlin sprint is finished, below some notes on what we worked on during the last three days:

• Camillo worked tirelessly on the gameboy emulator with some occasional input by various people. He is making good progress, some test ROMs run now on the translated emulator. However, the graphics are still not completely working for unclear reasons. Since PyBoy is already taken as a project name, we considered calling it PyGirl (another name proposition was "BoyBoy", but the implementation is not circular enough for that).

• On Monday Armin and Samuele fixed the problem with our multimethods so that the builtin shortcut works again (the builtin shortcut is an optimization that speeds up all operations on builtin non-subclassed types quite a bit).
• Antonio and Holger (who hasn't been on a sprint in a while, great to have you back!) worked on writing a conftest file (the plugin mechanism of py.test) that would allow us to run Django tests using py.test, which seems to be not completely trivial. They also fixed some bugs in PyPy's Python interpreter, e.g. related to dictionary subclassing.
• Karl started adding sound support to the RPython SDL-bindings, which will be needed both by the Gameboy emulator and eventually by the SPy VM.
• Armin and Maciek continued the work that Maciek had started a while ago of improving the speed of PyPy's IO operation. In the past, doing IO usually involved copying lots of memory around, which should have improved now. Armin and Maciek improved and then merged the first of the two branches that contained IO improvements, which speeds up IO on non-moving GCs (mostly the Boehm GC). Then they continued working on the hybrid-io branch which is supposed improve IO on the hybrid GC (which was partially designed exactly for this).
• Toon, Carl Friedrich finished cleaning up the SPy improvement branch and fixed all warnings that occur when you translate SPy there. An obscure bug in an optimization prevented them from getting working executables, which at this moment blocks the merging of that branch.

By now everybody is home again (except for Anto, who booked his return flight two days too late, accidentally) and mostly resting. It was a good sprint, with some interesting results and several new people joining. And it was definitely the most unusual sprint location ever :-).