Round Trip Roundup
Yes, I’m still alive. I am sitting here on the top floor of the Physics institute of the Heidelberg university where the PyPy sprint has been happening this week (photos here). Most other people are lingering outside on the terrace for the “technical board meeting”, deciding among other things whether I will get some kind of semi-official status in the complex organizational construct that is PyPy. This would mean that some of my travel and accomodation expenses for past and coming sprints would be paid by PyPy - another very cool result of Summer of Code. The next sprint happens mid-October in Paris, and most probably I will participate as university doesn’t start for me until the end of October.
This sprint was mostly focused on a new release of PyPy. In fact the release announcements are being sent out this very moment. Get it while it’s fresh. The main accomplishment is that the whole interpreter is translateable to C and LLVM, making it completely independent of CPython. My SoC project is integrated in this release, it has both my array and _sre module. I even managed to write an RPython version of _sre, which means PyPy can actually translate it back to C. I’m really happy about this since I did not expect to achieve that in time for the release. All in all, the conversion from regular Python to RPython was pretty effortless, except for that one bug that, abiding the Law of Murphy, didn’t turn up until the last moment yesterday evening when everything was being readied for the release …
The previous week at the ESUG conference in Brussels was lots of fun as well, although being somewhat new to the Smalltalk world, I sometimes felt a bit out of place. There are too many stories to tell (many of them involving Belgian beer at some point), so I will just point to the photo gallery for the conference. In particular you might be interested in these half-decent shots of mine on the couch in the lounge area and at the guided city tour.
What’s up next? Tomorrow I’m going back to Switzerland, sorting out small stuff that piled up there. In September I will be working in Göteborg, Sweden, with the nice bunch from Strakt that I got to know during the PyPy sprints. So at some point next week I will be already on the (rail) road again, most probably passing through Kopenhagen since my parents are currently staying there.