Integration Days
I’ve been integrating both my _sre and array modules into the PyPy trunk in the last days. This would have been much less painful if PyPy weren’t slow like molasses (or even slow like a glacier) if you’re working with a decent amount of application-level code. Importing the re module with my _sre.py takes around a minute. That may sound OKish, but if you do this several times in succession in a typical test-fix-test cycle, this becomes intolerable. It completely breaks my flow and concentration. I think this is how it must have felt to program on a batch mainframe in the 60ies.
The situation with unit tests is even hairier of course. It takes me almost an hour to run just the regex compliance tests on top of PyPy, even when skipping some of the most time-consuming tests. I want to run these tests every time before I commit any changes to _sre to the PyPy trunk, but boy does it cost me nerves. But I just know stuff will inevitably break if I don’t run the tests even after seemingly trivial changes and even with my daily sacrifices at the Murphy altar.
And now to something completely different: Both _sre and array pass all compliance tests when run on top of PyPy. That was the requirement defined for SoC with my mentors, so I’m basically, uhm, done. Only two weeks ahead of schedule. Well, OK, there are still some dark corners that need work.