PyPy 2.5.1 - Pineapple Bromeliad

We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.5.1, Pineapple Bromeliad following on the heels of 2.5.0

You can download the PyPy 2.5.1 release here:

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project, and for those who donate to our three sub-projects, as well as our volunteers and contributors. We’ve shown quite a bit of progress, but we’re slowly running out of funds. Please consider donating more, or even better convince your employer to donate, so we can finish those projects! The three sub-projects are:

  • Py3k (supporting Python 3.x): We have released a Python 3.2.5 compatible version

    we call PyPy3 2.4.0, and are working toward a Python 3.3 compatible version

  • STM (software transactional memory): We have released a first working version, and continue to try out new promising paths of achieving a fast multithreaded Python

  • NumPy which requires installation of our fork of upstream numpy, available on bitbucket

We would also like to encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: PyPy and Rpython documentation improvements, tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, or general help with making Rpython’s JIT even better.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7. It’s fast (pypy and cpython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

This release supports x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64, Windows, and OpenBSD), as well as newer ARM hardware (ARMv6 or ARMv7, with VFPv3) running Linux.

While we support 32 bit python on Windows, work on the native Windows 64 bit python is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer to handle that.

Highlights

  • The past months have seen pypy mature and grow, as rpython becomes the goto solution for writing fast dynamic language interpreters. Our separation of Rpython and the python interpreter PyPy is now much clearer in the PyPy documentation and we now have seperate RPython documentation. Tell us what still isn’t clear, or even better help us improve the documentation.
  • We merged version 2.7.9 of python’s stdlib. From the python release notice:
    • The entirety of Python 3.4’s ssl module has been backported. See PEP 466 for justification.
    • HTTPS certificate validation using the system’s certificate store is now enabled by default. See PEP 476 for details.
    • SSLv3 has been disabled by default in httplib and its reverse dependencies due to the POODLE attack.
    • The ensurepip module has been backported, which provides the pip package manager in every Python 2.7 installation. See PEP 477.
  • The garbage collector now ignores parts of the stack which did not change since the last collection, another performance boost
  • errno and LastError are saved around cffi calls so things like pdb will not overwrite it
  • We continue to asymptotically approach a score of 7 times faster than cpython on our benchmark suite, we now rank 6.98 on latest runs
  • Issues reported with our previous release were resolved after reports from users on our issue tracker at https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/issues or on IRC at #pypy.

Please try it out and let us know what you think. We welcome success stories, experiments, or benchmarks, we know you are using PyPy, please tell us about it!

Cheers

The PyPy Team