Duesseldorf sprint report
Carl Friedrich Bolz <cfbolz <at> gmx.de>
2006-11-05 14:43:38 GMT
Hi all!
it is with a familiar level of tiredness that we bring you these lines.
We are again sitting in one of the rooms of the Institut für Informatik,
after 6 days of sprinting. As usual, it has been a busy and productive
(and sometimes strange) sprint.
One of the new developments of the sprint was the work of Leonardo
Santadaga, our "Summer" of PyPy student from Brazil. Leonardo proposed
to write a JavaScript interpreter, had his proposal accepted and now
gets his travel to sprints funded. This work has seen good progress
every day, so that we now have an interpreter that handles simple
snippet of JavaScript code. Leonardo had help from various other people
changing over the course of the sprint such as Maciek, Guido (the
reluctant Master of JavaScript) and Stephan. The parser is currently
stolen from them Narcissus project, and the interpreter does not
translate yet. For less than a weeks work though we think are doing
pretty well (we are trying not to distract ourselves with crazy thoughts
like translating a JS interpreter to JS or wondering how fast it would
be after applying the magic JIT technology). Although Leonardo will be
flying back to Brazil soon he will continue working on it (at least if
he finds sufficient time between caring for his beloved new MacBook).
The other PyPy sprint virgin was Niko Matsakis, a graduate student at
ETH Zürich. To start with he worked with help of Antonio on the
fledgling JVM backend. Antonio and Niko worked on moving code out of the
CLI backend to be shared with other object-oriented backends. They got
as far as supporting nearly everything except constants (which as usual
turns out to be the hardest thing to support). The team was split up
later in the week to work on Other Things. Niko only found out after he
(Continue reading)