Wednesday 12 September 2007

PyCon UK - late review (part 2)

On the first day, between 11:30am and 1:00pm, there were two other interesting talks: one ebout PyPy by Michael Hudson and the other about Stackless by Christian Tismer.

PyPy

PyPy is python compiler written in python. I heard of it before, but never got quite interested. However, the talk changed it a dramatically. We've been presented bunch of exciting features that PyPy enables, that being: dynamic sandboxing, objects becoming other objects, dynamic parser changes (evil but fun :>) and many others. I like the idea of running PyPy in any python implementation in order to compile python scripts to native format (which means: assembly, .net intermediate language, java bytecode or some crazy stuff like javascript, or python itself [sicko]). I _really_ like the idea of running PyPy in any python implementation in order to compile PyPy itself into assembly. Unfortunately, the JIT compiler is still being developped, so we'll have to wait a for that.

Stackless

Stackless python is python implementation that removes GIL and introduces lightweight threads. This gives you a couple of new possibilities, one of which is to mime Erlang :P (and that's actually pretty good, since erlang's syntax doesn't appeal to me). There are some projects that make heavy use of stackless, the most famous probably being Eve online (where each player has his of her very own thread, yeah!). And there's one interesting pearl: there is a version of stackless, that's implemented on PyPy framework.

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