Personal view on PyPy's future

Hello.

PyPy has seen some dramatic progress in the past year with each release
delivering roughly 30% speed improvements over the previous one. I think
with a roughly 3-month release cycle, this is a pretty good achievement and
you haven't seen all of it yet :) We have quite a few improvements in process,
with the current trunk already showing faster performance than 1.7, even
though only a month has passed.

It might be worth mentioning that PyPy has many facets and progress is done
by multiple people in various directions. Examples include:

• STM work done by Armin, read details


• NumPy speed improvements, done mostly by Alex Gaynor and myself


• NumPy completeness, done by a lot of people, including myself, Alex, Matti
  Picus and some others, if you're interested in this progressing faster, feel
  free to donate towards NumPy on PyPy


• Specialized object-instances, worked by Carl Friedrich Bolz and
  Lukas Diekmann and various other specialized types


• ARM JIT backend, work by David Schneider and Armin


• PPC JIT backend, work by Sven Hager and David Edelsohn, with help from
  David Schneider


• Speed improvements, done by everyone

Overall this is about 30 commits daily -- quite a bit of activity.

Things I can do professionally that can help the community

There is however another aspect of PyPy development, which is things that are
interesting, would work but potentially are useful only to some, but are
out of the current focus of core developers. Personally, I'm working full
time on PyPy, even though I did not receive any compensation for it for the
last half a year. I hope to make working on PyPy my full-time job from
both the donation-based income like numpy donations and pypy consulting.
I promise not to spend all the numpy-related donations on surfing addiction :-)

Examples of what I can professionally do include, but are not limited to:

• Faster json decoder. Fast json encoder was done and details can be found.


• Finshing matplotlib hacks to support full matplotlib and scipy.


• Make your favorite module X work on PyPy.


• Make your favorite module X faster on PyPy.

Additionally, I recently started offering consulting services for PyPy,
please consult my website for details.

Cheers,
Maciej Fijałkowski