The PyPy San Franciso Bay Area Tour 2011

PyPy is coming to the San Francisco Bay Area in the beginning of March with a series of talks and a mini sprint.

• Wednesday March 2, 4:15 p.m. Armin Rigo gives a talk at Stanford. open to the public.

• Thursday March 3, 6:00 p.m. General talk at Yelp, 706 Mission St 9th Floor, San Francisco CA 94103 open to the public.

• Saturday and Sunday March 5 and 6. PyPy mini sprint at noisebridge. 2169 Mission street between 17th and 18th in San Francisco. Open to the public.

• Monday March 7th, 11:30 a.m. Google Tech talk in Mountain View at the Googleplex. Not open to the public (but the video should be available later).

• Monday March 7th, 2:30 p.m. Talk at Mozilla in Mountain View. Not open to the public (but Mozilla developers can videoconference).

From the PyPy project team we will have Armin Rigo, Maciej Fijałkowski (from 6th March), Laura Creighton and Jacob Hallén and possibly Christian Tismer attending.

Most of the talks will focus on (some of) the highlights and the status of pypy:

• most Python benchmarks run much faster than with CPython or Psyco
• the real-world PyPy compiler toolchain itself (200 KLocs) runs twice as fast
• supports x86 32 and 64bit and is in the process of supporting ARM
• full compatibility with CPython (more than Jython/IronPython)
• full (and JIT-ed) ctypes support to call C libraries from Python
• supports Stackless Python (in-progress)
• new "cpyext" layer which integrates existing CPython C extensions
• an experimental super-fast JIT-compilation of calls to C++ libraries

As is usual for us, there is vastly more material that is available for us to cover than time, especially when it comes to possible future directions for PyPy. We want to reserve a certain amount of time at each talk purely to discuss things that are of interest to audience members. However, if you already know what you wish we would discuss, and are attending a talk (or even if you aren't), please let us know. You can either reply to this blog post, or mail Laura directly at lac at openend.se .

Apart from getting more technical and project insight, our travel is also a good possibility for companies in the SF area to talk to us regarding contracting. In September 2011 our current "Eurostars" research project ends and some of us are looking for ways to continue working on PyPy through consulting, subcontracting or hiring. The two companies, Open End and merlinux, have successfully done a number of such contracts and projects in the past. If you want to talk business or get together for lunch or dinner, let us know! If you would like us to come to your company and make a presentation, let us know! If you have any ideas about what we should discuss in a presentation so that you could use it to convince the powers-that-be at your place of employment that investing time and money in PyPy would be a good idea, let us know!

On Tuesday March 8th we will be heading for Atlanta for the Python VM and Language Summits before attending PyCon. Maciej Fijałkowski and Alex Gaynor will be giving a talk entitled Why is Python slow and how can PyPy help? Maciej will also be giving the talk Running ultra large telescopes in Python which is partially about his experiences using PyPy in the Square Kilometer Array project in South Africa. There will be a PyPy Sprint March 14-17. All are welcome.