[pypy-dev] website update / pypy developments

[holger krekel]

[Rocco Moretti Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 11:37:38PM -0400]
> holger krekel <hpk at trillke.net> wrote:
> 
> >  After some discussions especially with Armin 
> >  i now think that we should promote as a goal to 
> >
> >    dynamically tie into/adapt arbritrary C-Libraries and
> >    operation system calls. 
> >
> >  The latter would basically mean that you could use Python directly to 
> >  drive your favourite OS. Think rapidly specializing for whatever 
> >  embedded device without even a libc and doing that with 99% of the 
> >  code beeing written in Python. 
> 
> I'm a little unclear by what you mean by this goal. As best I can tell, 
> you envision being able to put a shared library facade over pypy 
> functions, and then have the C/whatever library function calls be able to 
> seamlessly call into pypy without recompilation. e.g. we could write a 
> glibc facade which runs pypy 'under the hood' and drive precompiled linux 
> programs with pypy.

That's also an interesting idea :-)

It's more the other way round:  Dynamically setup a "C-call" from Python
and execute it.  ASFAIK you need assembler-written "trampolin" functions 
that help you in doing this work.  (Thomas Heller's ctypes module uses 
e.g. libffi on unices to do this).  It seems to be a far fetched goal 
but note that this was mentioned under "EU-funding" because they
apparently want "ambitious" goals.  Given we implement such a "trampolin"
technique you can imagine all sorts of nice stuff like having a 
small embedded device basically running on linux+python. PyPy would 
probably head for beeing a runtime-system in this case rather than
"just" a language reimplementation. 

> Is this getting close to the idea? ... If so, you are either insanely 
> brilliant, or insanely insane - though I'd lean toward the former.

I guess we have all kinds of such productive people in the project :-)

cheers,

    holger