A new chapter for PyPy

hodgestar — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 19:00:00 GMT

PyPy winds down its membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy

Conservancy and PyPy's great work together

PyPy joined Conservancy in the second half of 2010, shortly after the release of PyPy 1.2, the first version to contain a fully functional JIT. In 2013, PyPy started supporting ARM, bringing its just-in-time speediness to many more devices and began working toward supporting NumPy to help scientists crunch their numbers faster. Together, PyPy and Conservancy ran successful fundraising drives and facilitated payment and oversight for contractors and code sprints.

Conservancy supported PyPy's impressive growth as it expanded support for different hardware platforms, greatly improved the performance of C extensions, and added support for Python 3 as the language itself evolved.

The road ahead

Conservancy provides a fiscal and organizational home for projects that find the freedoms and guardrails that come along with a charitable home advantageous for their community goals. While this framework was a great fit for the early PyPy community, times change and all good things must come to an end.

PyPy will remain a free and open source project, but the community's structure and organizational underpinnings will be changing and the PyPy community will be exploring options outside of the charitable realm for its next phase of growth ("charitable" in the legal sense -- PyPy will remain a community project).

During the last year PyPy and Conservancy have worked together to properly utilise the generous donations made by stalwart PyPy enthusiats over the years and to wrap up PyPy's remaining charitable obligations. PyPy is grateful for the Conservancy's help in shepherding the project toward its next chapter.

Thank yous

From Conservancy:

"We are happy that Conservancy was able to help PyPy bring important software for the public good during a critical time in its history. We wish the community well and look forward to seeing it develop and succeed in new ways."

— Karen Sandler, Conservancy's Executive Director

From PyPy:

"PyPy would like to thank Conservancy for their decade long support in building the community and wishes Conservancy continued success in their journey promoting, improving, developing and defending free and open source sofware."

— Simon Cross & Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick, on behalf of PyPy.

About

PyPy is a multi-layer python interpreter with a built-in JIT compiler that runs Python quickly across different computing environments. Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy) is a charity that provides a home to over forty free and open source software projects.

Leysin 2020 Sprint Report

hodgestar — Tue, 17 Mar 2020 21:57:00 GMT

At the end of February ten of us gathered in Leysin, Switzerland to work on
a variety of topics including HPy, PyPy Python 3.7 support and the PyPy
migration to Heptapod.

We had a fun and productive week. The snow was beautiful. There was skiing
and lunch at the top of Berneuse, cooking together, some late nights at
the pub next door, some even later nights coding, and of course the
obligatory cheese fondue outing.

There were a few of us participating in a PyPy sprint for the first time
and a few familiar faces who had attended many sprints. Many different
projects were represented including PyPy, HPy, GraalPython,
Heptapod, and rust-cpython. The atmosphere was relaxed and welcoming, so if
you're thinking of attending the next one -- please do!

Topics worked on:

HPy

HPy is a new project to design and implement a better API for extending
Python in C. If you're unfamiliar with it you can read more about it at
HPy.

A lot of attention was devoted to the Big HPy Design Discussion which
took up two full mornings. So much was decided that this will likely
get its own detailed write-up, but bigger topics included:

the HPy GetAttr, SetAttr, GetItem and SetItem methods,
HPy_FromVoidP and HPy_AsVoidP for passing HPy handles to C functions
that pass void* pointers to callbacks,
avoiding having va_args as part of the ABI,
exception handling,
support for creating custom types.

Quite a few things got worked on too:

implemented support for writing methods that take keyword arguments with
HPy_METH_KEYWORDS,
implemented HPy_GetAttr, HPy_SetAttr, HPy_GetItem, and HPy_SetItem,
started implementing support for adding custom types,
started implementing dumping JSON objects in ultrajson-hpy,
refactored the PyPy GIL to improve the interaction between HPy and
PyPy's cpyext,
experimented with adding HPy support to rust-cpython.

And there was some discussion of the next steps of the HPy initiative
including writing documentation, setting up websites and funding, and
possibly organising another HPy gathering later in the year.

PyPy

Georges gave a presentation on the Heptapod topic and branch workflows
and showed everyone how to use hg-evolve.
Work was done on improving the PyPy CI buildbot post the move to
heptapod, including a light-weight pre-merge CI and restricting
when the full CI is run to only branch commits.
A lot of work was done improving the -D tests.

Miscellaneous

Armin demoed VRSketch and NaN Industries in VR, including an implementation
of the Game of Life within NaN Industries!
Skiing!

Aftermath

Immediately after the sprint large parts of Europe and the world were
hit by the COVID-19 epidemic. It was good to spend time together before
travelling ceased to be a sensible idea and many gatherings were cancelled.

Keep safe out there everyone.

The HPy & PyPy Team & Friends

In joke for those who attended the sprint: Please don't replace this blog post
with its Swedish translation (or indeed a translation to any other language :).

PyPy (Posts by hodgestar)