This is the report of the first day of the PyPy sprint session here at CERN.
The sprint began in the early afternoon (1.30pm) because this morning there was the CERN’s visit.
They started doing a crash-course-tutorial-so-my-head-did-boom presentation. PyPy is really complicated but it’s an interesting challenge. If you want to know more about its architecture and its present capabilities google for PyPy…
After the intro we (about 20 people) decided the topics of the sprint and divided ourselves in pairs (almost). There are the actual topics: planning.txt
So we began working!
I paired with Anders and Brian (a smart south african guy who lives in Barcelona) and we got into deep of the extension compiler machinery and rctypes limitations to port my previous work. We started kinda slow because… because that’s how you learn things. We managed to write some tests and a little functionality (basically time.accept2dyear and time.time()). We also discovered a couple of bugs in the PyPy translation toolchain. One has been fixed: the problem was there because C macros (geterrno specifically) are not supported by rctypes so… we’ve simply wrapped it in a function.
At the time of writing this post I’ve just finished the whole PyPy -> C translation and it worked so we didn’t made it explode (we tested it, but you can’t be sure anyway.) It took 53 minutes eventually. Nice, but I have a dual core 2Ghz CPU and 2Gb of ram…
The other problem is format_someobject_error in pypy.tool.error module. We had an empty block masking our actual block and a strange IndexError bug. So after some digging Anders came out with an hack (it’s not in the repository, only on my machine) to make it work in the translation process. We’ve to find the real reason behind this.
So, that’s it. It’s not very much but believe me… it’s brain-exploding stuff if you are a pypy newbie like me 
Anders was very kind to let us ask any kind of questions and provide hints and answers. I’m making progresses and that’s what counts. Hope to finish the all stuff before the summer of code deadline.
UPDATE: I also found myself in a toga party organized by the summer student at CERN so I met a lot of people and some nice girls 
. Tomorrow night will be dutch-party time… so let’s roll!
