Hacker News Reader

Comment by lost-theory | Hacker News Reader

I will be the first to ask: why did Alex / the pypy devs start this project? I thought the three community funded ideas were great (STM, Python 3, and Numpy). What prompted this new project? Is it meant to attract new developers to pypy as platform for implementing languages? Is it a side project? Is it a long term project meant to become the premium implementation of ruby as pypy is becoming for python? Etc.

Not criticizing at all by the way, just curious about the motivation / background / context for the project, which is missing from the docs.

View on HN

Hi to be clear, this is project undetaken by me (Alex) independently, it wasn't funded out of the PyPy funds or anything like that. There were 3 primary motivations:

a) Because it's fun

b) To prove RPython is a great platform

c) To mess with people's heads, it's crazy!

Hey Alex, let me tell you I completely understand points a) b) c) and more. It seems we started our competing Ruby on PyPy implementations at about the same time [0]! My goal was to build a robust and documented Ruby parser, and hope PyPy make it magically fast. To that end I embedded PLY and modified it to not require kwargs. Then a thunder of work fell from the skies, and I was just recently unearthing PyPy 1.9 to put the thing back on track.

Congratulations for the release :-)

[0]:

    $ ls -l playground/pypy
    total 29160
    drwxr-xr-x  12 lloeki  staff       408 18 Feb  2011 ply-3.4
    drwxr-xr-x  15 lloeki  staff       510  3 Apr  2012 pyby
    drwxr-xr-x  23 lloeki  staff       782 27 Mar  2012 pypy-pypy-2346207d9946
    drwxr-xr-x  18 lloeki  staff       612 27 Mar  2012 pypy-tutorial
    -rw-r--r--   1 lloeki  staff  14927806 27 Mar  2012 release-1.8.tar.bz2
    drwxr-xr-x  10 lloeki  staff       340  3 Apr  2012 unholy

Holy snakes[0]. It seems you pursued the exact same approach[1] as me :-)

[0]: https://github.com/topazproject/topaz/blob/master/topaz/lexe...

[1]: https://github.com/alex/rply

Reply on news.ycombinator.com