PyPy 2.1 - Considered ARMful

We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.1, which targets version 2.7.3 of the Python language. This is the first release with official support for ARM processors in the JIT. This release also contains several bugfixes and performance improvements.

You can download the PyPy 2.1 release here:

https://pypy.org/download.html

We would like to thank the Raspberry Pi Foundation for supporting the work to finish PyPy’s ARM support.

The first beta of PyPy3 2.1, targeting version 3 of the Python language, was just released, more details can be found here.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7. It’s fast (pypy 2.1 and cpython 2.7.2 performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

This release supports x86 machines running Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64 or Windows 32. This release also supports ARM machines running Linux 32bit - anything with ARMv6 (like the Raspberry Pi) or ARMv7 (like the Beagleboard, Chromebook, Cubieboard, etc.) that supports VFPv3 should work. Both hard-float armhf/gnueabihf and soft-float armel/gnueabi builds are provided. armhf builds for Raspbian are created using the Raspberry Pi custom cross-compilation toolchain based on gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf and should work on ARMv6 and ARMv7 devices running Debian or Raspbian. armel builds are built using the gcc-arm-linux-gnuebi toolchain provided by Ubuntu and currently target ARMv7.

Windows 64 work is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer to handle that.

Highlights

• JIT support for ARM, architecture versions 6 and 7, hard- and soft-float ABI

• Stacklet support for ARM

• Support for os.statvfs and os.fstatvfs on unix systems

• Improved logging performance

• Faster sets for objects

• Interpreter improvements

• During packaging, compile the CFFI based TK extension

• Pickling of numpy arrays and dtypes

• Subarrays for numpy

• Bugfixes to numpy

• Bugfixes to cffi and ctypes

• Bugfixes to the x86 stacklet support

• Fixed issue 1533: fix an RPython-level OverflowError for space.float_w(w_big_long_number).

• Fixed issue 1552: GreenletExit should inherit from BaseException.

• Fixed issue 1537: numpypy __array_interface__

• Fixed issue 1238: Writing to an SSL socket in PyPy sometimes failed with a “bad write retry” message.

Cheers,

David Schneider for the PyPy team.