San Francisco Python Meetup Group

PyPy Just-in-Time Interpreters, presented by Armin Rigo

March 3, 2011 · 6:00 PM
Yelp

Armin Rigo of the PyPy project will be visiting San Francisco and we are thrilled to be working with Yelp this month to produce another meeting. We will start a little earlier than usual. Please note that security at Yelp is far straighter than our other hosting sites. It is imperative that you bring your ID and that you have pre-registered here to be allowed in the event. http://tinyurl.com/meetup-3-3-11

Agenda:

6:00p - Check-in and mingle, with Pizza and Beer provided by our sponsor Yelp
6:40p Welcome, Lightning Talks (5 minutes each), announcements
7.00p - Featured Speaker - Armin Rigo
7.45p - Q & A and more Mingling
8:30p - Door close

Abstract: The PyPy project has recently gathered a lot of attention for its progress in speeding up the Python language -- it is the fastest, most compatible and most stable 'alternative´ Python interpreter. No longer merely a research curiosity, PyPy is now suitable for production use. Since 2009, the PyPy project has received funding from the Eurostars Eureka program, which targets small European firms which produce research. (See: http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/ )

We will discuss what the PyPy project has achieved, with a particular focus on the past two years' work in the area of dynamic (Just-in-Time) interpreters:

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 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 The PyPy project has a blog which may be of interest.

You can read it at http://morepypy.blogspot.com/ .

Speaker Bio:

Armin Rigo is a researcher at Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf, Germany. His academic interests include Programming Languages and Implementation Techniques. He is the lead designer of the PyPy project and one of its original founders. He is also the author of Psyco, a hand-coded Just-in-Time specializing compiler for Python, which can be used transparently with 32-bit x86 versions of CPython. Since 2003 he has worked on all aspects of PyPy: its Python interpreter (written in Python), its translation toolchain (which produces C code), its garbage collectors, and its Tracing Just-in-Time compiler generator. Since the end of 2010, the Just in Time compiler generated by PyPy has outperformed Psyco, while being much more general and robust.

I'd like to thank Yelp again for helping put this together and providing the food and drinks for this event. As usual, feel free to let me know if you have any questions or suggestions

Grace

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Jeff Madynski

Fun venue, a lot of great people. Armin's presentation definitely opened my eyes to trying out pypy and gave me a glimpse of how it works and why it is faster.

0 · March 4, 2011
A former member

A lot of info

0 · March 4, 2011
Rob Ottaway

Looking forward to giving it a try. Would like to have heard more ideas on which exact types of projects would benefit most. Like webapps, vs services, vs natural language processing and so forth.

0 · March 4, 2011
A former member

At first, the tempo seemed a bit slow, but as Armin delved into the headier material, I was happy with the pace.

0 · March 4, 2011
A former member

Thought the dual statements of "there are no bugs, please deploy this in production" and "no one's ever deployed this in production except for us" was pretty naive.

0 · March 4, 2011