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PyPy 1.4.1

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Here is PyPy 1.4.1 :-)

Update: Win32 binaries available.

Enjoy!

Release announcement

We're pleased to announce the 1.4.1 release of PyPy. This release consolidates all the bug fixes that occurred since the previous release. To everyone that took the trouble to report them, we want to say thank you.

What is PyPy

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython. Note that it still only emulates Python 2.5 by default; the fast-forward branch with Python 2.7 support is slowly getting ready but will only be integrated in the next release.

In two words, the advantage of trying out PyPy instead of CPython (the default implementation of Python) is, for now, the performance. Not all programs are faster in PyPy, but we are confident that any CPU-intensive task will be much faster, at least if it runs for long enough (the JIT has a slow warm-up phase, which can take several seconds or even one minute on the largest programs).

Note again that we do support compiling and using C extension modules from CPython (pypy setup.py install). However, this is still an alpha feature, and the most complex modules typically fail for various reasons; others work (e.g. PIL) but take a serious performance hit. Also, for Mac OS X see below.

Please note also that PyPy's performance was optimized almost exclusively on Linux. It seems from some reports that on Windows as well as Mac OS X (probably for different reasons) the performance might be lower. We did not investigate much so far.

More highlights

  • We migrated to Mercurial (thanks to Ronny Pfannschmidt and Antonio Cuni) for the effort) and moved to bitbucket. The new command to check out a copy of PyPy is:
    hg clone https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy

  • In long-running processes, the assembler generated by old JIT-compilations is now freed. There should be no more leak, however long the process runs.

  • Improve a lot the performance of the binascii module, and of hashlib.md5 and hashlib.sha.

  • Made sys.setrecursionlimit() a no-op. Instead, we rely purely on the built-in stack overflow detection mechanism, which also gives you a RuntimeError -- just not at some exact recursion level.

  • Fix argument processing (now e.g. pypy -OScpass works like it does on CPython --- if you have a clue what it does there :-) )

  • cpyext on Mac OS X: it still does not seem to work. I get systematically a segfault in dlopen(). Contributions welcome.

  • Fix two corner cases in the GC (one in minimark, one in asmgcc+JIT). This notably prevented pypy translate.py -Ojit from working on Windows, leading to crashes.

  • Fixed a corner case in the JIT's optimizer, leading to Fatal RPython error: AssertionError.

  • Added some missing built-in functions into the 'os' module.

  • Fix ctypes (it was not propagating keepalive information from c_void_p).

Comments

Symbol wrote on 2010-12-22 12:00:

Wow, and I thought 1.4.1 would come out after the january sprint!

A christmas present :->

What would be the focus of the january sprint then?

Armin Rigo wrote on 2010-12-22 12:09:

There are still a number of branches that have not been merged into trunk yet: at least fast-forward (Python 2.7), jit-unroll-loops (better JITting of arithmetic and short loops), arm-backend (JIT support on ARM) and jitypes2 (turn ctypes calls into real assembler-level calls with the JIT). There is also the stackless+JIT integration pending. Finally the sprint will also be a place to try out and run some applications. So it's not like we are out of work :-)

Unknown wrote on 2010-12-22 13:10:

I'm interested in the performance improvement in hashlib.sha. I haven't seen that one before on https://speed.pypy.org . Could you give me more details?

Regards,

Zooko

Armin Rigo wrote on 2010-12-22 13:59:

Actually, hashlib.sha was not the same as sha.sha: the former used to be a ctypes call to the OpenSSL lib, whereas the latter uses our built-in sha implementation. So hashlib.sha was faster in theory, but killed by the overhead of using ctypes. Now, at least in a default version of pypy, the hashlib.md5 and .sha are redirected to the built-in md5.md5 and sha.sha.

Another issue was that with the built-in md5.md5 and sha.sha, on 64-bit, there was a 1.5x speed impact due to the C compiler not recognizing an expression that was meant to be a 32-bit integer rotation.

I guess that https://speed.pypy.org don't show this because they use directly md5.md5 or sha.sha, and are on 32-bit.

Martijn Faassen wrote on 2010-12-22 14:14:

Thanks for PyPy 1.4.1. I reported two issues concerning buildout with PyPy 1.4, and they all got fixed!

So PyPy 1.4.1 is now compatible with buildout, which is really convenient as it makes it easy for me to test other projects.

shadinger wrote on 2010-12-28 16:00:

I compiled 1.4.1 on Win32 using Visual C++ 2010.

Do you want to add it to the download page?

To whom shall I send it?

Happy new year.

Andrei wrote on 2011-01-28 20:08:

Hello,

sorry, I'm a bit new here - is it possible that PyPy makes Python run in a browser? Somehow "translating" all the Python into Javascript?

I'm wondering because I saw you run, for example, CLI, so perhaps PyPy may somehow enable Python in a browser?

Armin Rigo wrote on 2011-01-29 10:23:

Andrei: not directly. We played at some point with translating RPython code to Javascript, but it didn't give enough benefits (because it's not full Python that we can translate, just "RPython"). The alternative would be to translate the whole PyPy interpreter to Javascript, but that would give a result that is both huge (in term of download size) and horribly slow (100x slower than Javascript maybe).

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