PyPy 2.1 - Considered ARMful
We're pleased to announce PyPy 2.1, which targets version 2.7.3 of the Python
language. This is the first release with official support for ARM processors in the JIT.
This release also contains several bugfixes and performance improvements.
You can download the PyPy 2.1 release here:
https://pypy.org/download.html
We would like to thank the Raspberry Pi Foundation for supporting the work
to finish PyPy's ARM support.
The first beta of PyPy3 2.1, targeting version 3 of the Python language, was
just released, more details can be found here.
What is PyPy?¶
PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7. It's fast (pypy 2.1 and cpython 2.7.2 performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.
This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64 or Windows 32. This release also supports ARM machines running Linux 32bit - anything with ARMv6 (like the Raspberry Pi) or ARMv7 (like the Beagleboard, Chromebook, Cubieboard, etc.) that supports VFPv3 should work. Both hard-float armhf/gnueabihf and soft-float armel/gnueabi builds are provided. The armhf builds for Raspbian are created using the Raspberry Pi custom cross-compilation toolchain based on gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf and should work on ARMv6 and ARMv7 devices running Debian or Raspbian. The armel builds are built using the gcc-arm-linux-gnuebi toolchain provided by Ubuntu and currently target ARMv7.
Windows 64 work is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer to handle that.
Highlights¶
- JIT support for ARM, architecture versions 6 and 7, hard- and soft-float ABI
- Stacklet support for ARM
- Support for os.statvfs and os.fstatvfs on unix systems
- Improved logging performance
- Faster sets for objects
- Interpreter improvements
- During packaging, compile the CFFI based TK extension
- Pickling of numpy arrays and dtypes
- Subarrays for numpy
- Bugfixes to numpy
- Bugfixes to cffi and ctypes
- Bugfixes to the x86 stacklet support
- Fixed issue 1533: fix an RPython-level OverflowError for space.float_w(w_big_long_number).
- Fixed issue 1552: GreenletExit should inherit from BaseException.
- Fixed issue 1537: numpypy __array_interface__
- Fixed issue 1238: Writing to an SSL socket in PyPy sometimes failed with a "bad write retry" message.
Cheers,
David Schneider for the PyPy team.
Comments
What about gevent support in this release? i am waiting for full support to switch to pypy on production
Some issues with gevent were fixed. You need to try it out and report any remaining issues, if any.
If i read well, you did not use any ThumbEE instructions for your Arm support ? So there is room for improvement ?
ThumbEE is deprecated nowadays.
Has cdecimal been backported into either version of PyPy yet? If not, any near-term plan to do so?
cdecimal is purely a speed gain. On PyPy the pure Python decimal.py is accelerated by the JIT, though it is probably possible to gain some small extra factor by rewriting it directly in RPython.
If your problem is merely that project X has listed cdecimal in its dependencies, then we could add a "cdecimal.egg-info" file that says "yup, it's installed" and be done (assuming that the API is really the same one as decimal.py).
cdecimal is actually based on a C library (libmpdec). Maybe a ffi-based binding could give interesting results.
Importing sqlite3 incurs a huge delay in the latest armhf jit nightly (15 August).
Will PyPy PPA be updated? https://launchpad.net/~pypy/+archive/ppa