[pypy-dev] Re: amsterdam sprint reports (20th december 2003)

[Michael Hudson]

holger krekel <hpk at trillke.net> writes:

> "finishing" the Annotation refactoring
> --------------------------------------
>
> That should be easy, right?  Actually Guido van Rossum and Armin had
> started doing type inference/annotation in Belgium just before
> EuroPython and we have since refactored it already at the Berlin
> sprint and in between the sprints several times.  But it turned out
> that Annotations as we did them are *utterly broken* in that we try
> to do a too general system (we had been talking about general
> inference engines and such) thus making "merging" of two annotations
> very hard to do in a meaningful way. But after beeing completly
> crushed on one afternoon, Samuele and Armin came up with a new
> *simpler* approach that ... worked and promises to not have the same
> flaws.  It got integrated into the translator already and appears to
> work nicely.

If this scheme is going to stand the test of time, it would be really
nice if it got some high-level documentation.  I've been trying to
follow progress here, but as soon as you look at it, it changes...

> I think this is the fourth refactoring of just "three files" and, of
> course, we already have the 'XXX' virus spreading again :-)
>
> refactoring/rewriting the test framework
> ----------------------------------------
>
> PyPy has an ever increasing test-suite which requires a lot of
> flexibility that the standard unittest.py module just doesn't
> provide.  Currently, we have in tool/test.py and
> interpreter/unittest_w.py a collection of more or less weird hacks
> to make our (now over 500) tests run either at interpreter level or
> at application level which means they are actually interpreted by
> PyPy.  Tests from both levels can moreover be run with different
> object spaces.  Thus Stefan Schwarzer and me came up with a rewrite
> of unittest.py which is currently in 'newtest.py'.  During my train
> ride back to germany i experimentally used our new approach which
> let our tests run around 30% faster (!) as a side effect.  More
> about this in separate mails as this is - as almost every other area
> of PyPy - refactoring-in-progress.

I think this stuff looks really cool.

> On the Amsterdam sprint maybe more than ever we realized how
> strongly refactoring is the key development activity in PyPy. Watch
> those "XXX" :-) Some would argue that we should instead think more
> about what we are doing but then you wouldn't call that extreme
> programming, would you?
>
> However, we haven't fixed a site and date for the next sprint,
> yet.

Here's hoping I'll be able to make that one...

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
  ZAPHOD:  You know what I'm thinking?
    FORD:  No.
  ZAPHOD:  Neither do I.  Frightening isn't it?
                   -- The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Episode 11