Europython 2008 PyPy talks and sprint sum up

The EuroPython 2008 conference and sprints have finished - it certainly was a very eventful and successful conference for PyPy. And many very interesting non-PyPy talks as well. PyPy presentations are available online: PyPy status talk PyPy for the rest of us, PyPy behind the scenes. Armin and Maciej also did a well-attended talk about PyPy's garbage collection, but that was quite interactive, no slides.

The talks were all well visited and we got good questions. However, we still need to work on sorting out the "PyPy technology cloud" and how to present it to different audiences. Anyway, we are happy to hear feedback or questions about the talks!

After the conference there was a three-day PyPy sprint. Despite the fact that most PyPy core developers were zombies, we made good progress. Particularly our newcomers did very well. Here are some results:

• itertools rewritten in RPython for performance by Jakub Gustak and Andrew Durdin
• a new ctypes based dbm and hashlib module, both by Gasper Zejn with support from Henrik Vendelbo, they also got ctypes to nicely work on OSX. (sorry for lack of proper letters in names :)
• implement builtin function call profiling by Stephan Diehl, Antonio and Armin.
• running Pinax on top of pypy-c, by Henrik, Holger, Gasper.
• Jim Baker started a _rawffi.py for Jython using JNA aiming to provide support to run PyPy's ctypes on top of Jython. When Jython gets this to run, PyPy's JVM backend should be able to use it. Talk about Code Reuse :)
• oldstyle classes are now the default, this makes PyPy mimick very closely cpython's 2.5 object model.
• Andrew started a port of the Malbolge interpreter written in Python to RPython (obviously the only missing link for PyPy to take over the world).
• various cleanups (a new option "--lonepycfiles" helps with saner imports, remove int-float comparison shortcuts, ...)

At the end of the sprint we also discussed initial plans for a 1.1 release which we'd like to make happen this year. So we are generally looking forward to a busy rest of 2008 and luckily this starts by many of us taking a good vacation first :)

Cheers,
fijal & holger