Today I continued working on the rctime module with the supervision of Anders. I’m improving my knowledge of rpython and how the interpreter level and application level works and how to make them communicate. This is not really documented in deep so you’ve to check out examples also.

Sad, a swiss boy, joined us and started learning how rctypes work. I think he’s porting zlib module by himself. Now he has a codespeak account so he can work on the live project.

We checked in the fix in format_somobject_error because it was needed by other people that encountered the same problem.

I now know the basics of the machinery of making tests pass and the translation process too.

You can’t use space.unwrap() directly in the interpreter level stuff that goes translated because it’s not supported at all (thanks Armin and Anders!) so you have to use XXX_w functions in the object space.

In the morning I also tried to make my stuff work on Windows but I gave up after installing the .NET SDK 1.1, .NET runtime 1.1, mingw compiler and do some hacking to work around the actual problem that python 2.4 is compiled against msvcrt71.dll but it’s part of the MS VC++ 2003 toolkit that is not available anymore. Visual Studio 2005 provides msvcrt80.dll so I didn’t manage to make it work. Windows is very unfriendly to developers not using all MS tools.

I completed time.sleep(), time.clock(), time.ctime(), time.struct_time, time.gmtime(), time.localtime(), time.mktime()

I have a problem using the translated module on CPython because I have a problem in checking the presence of an optional argument. So basically, if you don’t pass anything to, for example, time.localtime() it fails but if you explicitly pass None as the actual argument it works well. On py.py it works very well. Tonight I’ll try to translate all pypy.

After the sprint we had dinner and after Fabrizio, Alexander, Antonio and I joined summer students at a very funny Dutch party. Summer students here at CERN know how to have fun! They’re obviously physicists or computer scientists from all over the world. From Japan to New York City.