July 12, 2008

PyPy Continues to Catch Up

Interesting news from the EuroPython sprints at Vilnius via Holger Krekel. PyPy supports Django well enough to run the Pinax application put together by an open source team coordinated by James Tauber. It's great to see Python expanding in so many directions at once. The future is definitelyto be interesting.

Django seems to be becoming one of the "how good is your implementation" tests for Python implementations. Not only are the PyPy team using it in this way, but IronPython and Jython are as well. Since Jython is now in alpha with a Python 2.5-compatible implementation the picture is looking better and better every day.

The one thing nobody has discussed much is the attitude of the PyPy, Jython and IronPython development teams to migration towards Python 3.0. Does it represent the next wave, or will it end up as an isolated development?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Based on my limited knowledge about PyPy:
* Python 3.0 isn't out yet
* Python 3.0 will start out as an alternate, not the primary install. Python 2.x will remain the default interpreter for the next couple of years.
* Supporting the 3.0 language changes are not a big deal in PyPy.
* Supporting the 3.0 runtime library is a significant task.
* To support 3.0, it makes sense to first implement 2.6

Steve said...

You are right in what you say about the relationship between 3.0 and the 2.X series. I'm not sure why you suggest that library support will be more difficult for 3.0, though.

Michael Foord said...

In his 2007 talk at US PyCon, Jim outlined the roadmap for IronPython - which included supporting Python 2.6 and Python 3.

Steve said...

Thanks, Mike. There's always way too much going on at PyCon to catch it all.