We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.4, which contains significant performance enhancements and bug fixes.
You can download the PyPy 2.4.0 release here:
We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project, and for those who donate to our three sub-projects. We’ve shown quite a bit of progress, but we’re slowly running out of funds. Please consider donating more, or even better convince your employer to donate, so we can finish those projects! We would like to also point out that in September, the Python Software Foundation will match funds for any donations up to $10k! The three sub-projects are:
we call PyPy3 2.3.1, and are working toward a Python 3.3 compatible version
STM (software transactional memory): We have released a first working version, and continue to try out new promising paths of achieving a fast multithreaded Python
NumPy which requires installation of our fork of upstream numpy, available on bitbucket
PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7. It’s fast (pypy 2.4 and cpython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.
This release supports x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64, Mac OS X 64, Windows, and OpenBSD), as well as newer ARM hardware (ARMv6 or ARMv7, with VFPv3) running Linux.
While we support 32 bit python on Windows, work on the native Windows 64 bit python is still stalling, we would welcome a volunteer to handle that.
Benchmarks improved after internal enhancements in string and bytearray handling, and a major rewrite of the GIL handling. This means that external calls are now a lot faster, especially the CFFI ones. It also means better performance in a lot of corner cases with handling strings or bytearrays. The main bugfix is handling of many socket objects in your program which in the long run used to “leak” memory.
PyPy now uses Python 2.7.8 standard library.
We fixed a memory leak in IO in the sandbox code
We welcomed more than 12 new contributors, and conducted two Google Summer of Code projects, as well as other student projects not directly related to Summer of Code.
Issues reported with our previous release were fixed after reports from users on our new issue tracker at https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/issues or on IRC at #pypy. Here is a summary of the user-facing changes; for more information see whats-new:
We have further improvements on the way: rpython file handling, numpy linalg compatibility, as well as improved GC and many smaller improvements.
Please try it out and let us know what you think. We especially welcome success stories, we know you are using PyPy, please tell us about it!
Cheers
The PyPy Team