Sessions at EuroPython 2011 about PyPy on Thursday 23rd June

The PyPy project has recently gathered a lot of attention for its
progress in speeding up the Python language -- it is the fastest
Python interpreter, and the most compatible and most stable
'alternative´ one. No longer merely a research project, PyPy
is now suitable for production use. We are working on improvements
on calling into C libraries and generally integrating with
the existing Python extensions ecosystem.

We will give an overview on how the tracing Just-in-Time compiler
works in PyPy. From there, we will then focus on what the PyPy
project has achieved, particularly in the past two years:

• most Python benchmarks run much faster than with CPython or Psyco
• the real-world PyPy compiler toolchain itself (200 KLocs) runs twice as fast
• already supports 32 and 64bit x86 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

We want to reserve time for discussing potential future work like SWIG
and/or Cython compatibility and other areas brought up by the audience.
There are many interesting details that can be explored further;
we will focus on the points the audience is most interested in.

For more info:

• http://pypy.org/
• Our blog: http://morepypy.blogspot.com/
• Eureka program: http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/ [1]

[1] Eurostars Eureka is our funding source since 2009. It is a
cross-European funding collaboration that targets small firms
which produce research.