Pypy is exiting for me because of two things.

-Python implemented in python.
-Compile to C, llvm and eventually native code.

This combined enables python to baby-bootstrap itself. That's a feat smalltalk and lisp have archieved quite early on. However it's not so common to see languages do that.

I think we've all accepted that python is a more productive language then C. Python implemented in python means that members of the Pypy dev crew can implement more peps with the same efford then the maintainers of other codebases (CPython, IronPython, Jython etc.)

I expect that in the long term this will atract maintainers from the other codebases, and ultimately lead to all other python interpreters be implemented in terms of compiler backends for Pypy.

The rest is just goodies for me.
Florian B�sch | Homepage | 05/08/03 - 3:45 pm | #

( of course it's good to have one codebase implementing python, and the compiler backends implementing the platform specifics. It means less platform dependence, a more uniform python and a great increase in productivity for all maintainers )
Florian B�sch | Homepage | 05/08/03 - 3:47 pm | #

AFAIK Smalltalk didn't bootstrap itself until Squeak, nearly two decades later.
Ian Bicking | Homepage | 05/08/03 - 9:41 pm | #

Ah interesting. So that'd make lisp practically the only language to do this relatively early.

I'd be interesting to see a high-level language (other then a lisp dialect) emerge who did this as one of the first things.
Anonymous | 05/08/03 - 10:35 pm | #