PyPy and CFFI have moved to Heptapod

It has been a very busy month, not so much because of deep changes in the JIT of PyPy but more around the development, deployment, and packaging of the project.

 

Hosting

The biggest news is that we have moved the center of our development off Bitbucket and to the new https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy. This is a friendly fork of Gitlab called heptapod that understands Mercurial and is hosted by Clever Cloud. When Atlassian decided to close down Mercurial hosting on bitbucket.org, PyPy debated what to do. Our development model is based on long-lived branches, and we want to keep the ability to immediately see which branch each commit came from. Mercurial has this, git does not (see our FAQ). Octobus, whose business is Mercurial, developed a way to use Mercurial with Gitlab called heptapod. The product is still under development, but quite usable (i.e., it doesn't get in the way). Octobus partnered with Clever Cloud hosting to offer community FOSS projects hosted on Bitbucket who wish to remain with Mercurial a new home. PyPy took them up on the offer, and migrated its repos to https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy. We were very happy with how smooth it was to import the repos to heptapod/GitLab, and are learning the small differences between Bitbucket and GitLab. All the pull requests, issues, and commits kept the same ids, but work is still being done to attribute the issues, pull requests, and comments to the correct users. So from now on, when you want to contribute to PyPy, you do so at the new home.

CFFI, which previously was also hosted on Bitbucket, has joined the PyPy group at https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/cffi.

 

Website

Secondly, thanks to work by https://baroquesoftware.com/ in leading a redesign and updating the logo, the https://www.pypy.org website has undergone a facelift. It should now be easier to use on small-screen devices. Thanks also to the PSF for hosting the site.

 

Packaging

Also, building PyPy from source takes a fair amount of time. While we provide downloads in the form of tarballs or zipfiles, and some platforms such as debian and Homebrew provide packages, traditionally the downloads have only worked on a specific flavor of operating system. A few years ago squeaky-pl started providing portable builds. We have adopted that build system for our linux offerings, so the nightly downloads and release downloads should now work on any glibc platform that has not gone EndOfLife. So there goes another excuse not to use PyPy. And the "but does it run scipy" excuse also no longer holds, although "does it speed up scipy" still has the wrong answer. For that we are working on HPy, and will be sprinting soon.
The latest versions of pip, wheel, and setuptools, together with the manylinux2010 standard for linux wheels and tools such as multibuild or cibuildwheels (well, from the next version) make it easier for library developers to build binary wheels for PyPy. If you are having problems getting going with this, please reach out.

 

Give it a try

Thanks to all the folks who provide the infrastructure PyPy depends on. We hope the new look will encourage more involvement and engagement. Help prove us right!

The PyPy Team