PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 12:26 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
Parent article: PyPy 1.4 released

Not packaged in debian yet, strange. Also there is no official installer; that makes it a bit hard to try it out.

Anyway I tried it. For my own package it was a bit slower than Python (1:44 vs 1:01), which is a pity: I do a lot of string manipulation, and it should be easy to speed up. On the other hand, a huge thumbs up on compatibility.

I think the package now needs wider exposure, so they should try to get it into distributions as a drop-in replacement for Python.

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 13:06 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

>I think the package now needs wider exposure, so they should try to get it into distributions as a drop-in replacement for Python.

There's no support for extensions in C which is used in quite a lot of libraries. So it can't be a drop-in replacement.

I tried to use it on my Pylons webapp, but there's no pure-Python PostgreSQL client for Python 2.6 (there is one for Python3).

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 13:18 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

Apparently Pypy devs are working on that too, although it seems to be slow in the coming (not released since 1.2). There shouldn't be a fundamental reason why extensions are not supported.

So it's a drop-in replacement for pure Python apps only. It could come handy in many environments. Another issue is that JIT support appears to be x86-only, so perhaps there is not a big improvement (or IME a minor loss of performance) on other platforms.

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 23:30 UTC (Sun) by weuhrqefrvehfbdav (guest, #71516) [Link]

PyPy has gained preliminary support for C extension modules in the 1.3 release, see here, here and here for details. They are trying to provide the complete C Python API, but most extensions usually need some adjustments to work with cpyext.

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 13:31 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> There's no support for extensions in C which is used in quite a lot of libraries.
There will be though, see http://pypy.org/compat.html.

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 14:31 UTC (Sun) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (1 responses)

> I tried to use it on my Pylons webapp, but there's no pure-Python PostgreSQL client for Python 2.6 (there is one for Python3).

There are at least three of those for python 2.X:

pgasync: http://jamwt.com/pgasync/ (an async implementation for the Twisted mainloop, which might not work for your Django app)
bpgsql: http://barryp.org/software/bpgsql/
pg8000: http://pybrary.net/pg8000/

PyPy in Debian

Posted Nov 28, 2010 16:40 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I've tried bpgsql and pgasync, neither of them works with Pylons and pgasync appears to be dead.

I'll try pg8000 - looks nice.