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I discovered that PyPy used to be in Debian, back in the days of PyPy 1.0, but it was removed because it took so long to build and because it wasn't yet generally useful. The latest releases of PyPy seem to be a lot more useful, and hopefully the build-time is being addressed...

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I tried building pypy on my macbook pro w/4 4gb of ram and 2.4 GHz i5. After over an hour I had to give up and cancel it. It took another fifteen minutes for the system to recover enough to where I could start using it again.

I don't know what it was doing but there was a python process that was using every bit of CPU available and a ton of swap.

This same machine can build ruby 1.9.2 in under 10 minutes. It took less time to download and refresh all of my installed macports (including postgresql 9.0) than it took to attempt to build pypy.

Even though the documentation[1] says you need at least 4GB of RAM to build 64-bit PyPy, I've never successfully building PyPy on a 4GB machine. It took about 20 minutes to successfully build on a machine with 8GB RAM, though.

[1]: http://pypy.org/download.html

AFAIK, the build time is unlikely to change any time soon, since it's a complex process doing whole-program analysis on an interpreter, and translating it to a lower level binary.

It does however build much, much faster on PyPy.

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