[Zope-dev] PyPy 1.4.1 and the ZTK

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I thought it'd be interesting to note that PyPy 1.4.1 (with JIT) now 
works out of the box with buildout (at least if I use the '-d' option 
for distribute with bootstrap.py, but I suspect plain setuptools also 
works). I actually added a few compatibility fixes to buildout the other 
day that are now unnecessary: PyPy 1.4.1 adds the compatibility with 
released versions of buildout out of the box.

This makes it possible to start testing some of the ZTK with PyPy. There 
are challenges of course: certain packages, such as zope.interface, use 
C extensions and would need to be installed in "plain-python" mode (if 
available). The ZODB would definitely be an interesting challenge too.

One snag is that PyPy is only compatible up to Python 2.5. This might 
make some of the code fail. Then again, if it's the 'with' statement the 
fix is an "from __future__ import with_statement" away.

A release of PyPy with Python 2.7 support is still a while away, but 
being worked on.

The benefit of using PyPy? It has a JIT on board, so that should speed 
up some code significantly. Whether it'll speed up some of our tests is 
hard to say though - the JIT might be more overhead than gain in that case.

Regards,

Martijn