After 0.0.15 I have quickly released 0.0.16. It essentially adds frozenset and fixes some bugs, as reported by users of 0.0.15. The next release is coming along nicely too, and should be ready within about a week. Here's a list of changes:
-added frozenset
-time.sleep now works on WIN32
-constant-string expressions and __doc__ attributes are made into nice C++ comments
-added --nowrap optimization option to ss.py (disables checking for negative indices)
-several minor bug-fixes reported by users of 0.0.15
Because I have a huge amount of spare time coming up to work on Shed Skin, I have started to think about what is necessary to do a 0.1 release. These are currently the most important shortcomings:
-support for iterators, generators and generator expressions
The first two seem mostly a case of how to do this nicely in C++, and the latter one seems easy.
-support for tuples t of len > 2 and with different types of elements
Again this seem mostly a case of how to do this nicely in C++. I'm looking forward to finding out how to do this.
-scalability of the type analysis
Because of all the details involved in doing a python compiler, I still haven't focused on this too much. The basic techniques seem to work very well, but I have many ideas yet to work out to improve scalability. Based on my work so far, I'm convinced it is possible to quickly analyze most programs up to a few thousands lines, even without any form of profiling.
-two-way integration with CPython
There may be some progress at this front, as another developer has decided to look into using boost.python for this purpose. It's rather exciting to see small fragments of this work already. If anything, it has made me optimistic about having something like this work in the near future.
-some optimizations: strings (replace std::string), indexing (remove wrap-around checks by proving an index expression is always positive), heap allocation (transform heap allocation into stack- and static preallocation, when possible)
While not essential for a 0.1 release, an important goal of Shed Skin is to generate really fast code. Especially the latter optimization would be a great master's thesis subject.. :-)
Friday, December 29, 2006
Friday, December 08, 2006
Shed Skin 0.0.15
After being distracted by my work for a few months, I'm finally back to Shed Skin development. It's interesting how the same boring programming work is more fun when you don't get paid for it! Anyway, I hope to work on Shed Skin full-time for at least the next three months, which should lead to several interesting improvements. I'm not sure exactly which those will be yet, as I never really plan ahead much.
For starters, I updated Shed Skin to work with the newly released Python version 2.5. As part of this, I added support for the new 'any' and 'all' keywords and for conditional expressions. The new Shed Skin release (0.0.15) also comes with support for several, previously unsupported library functions. IIRC, these are:
os.path.{split, splitext, islink, isdir, isfile, exists}
os.{stat, lstat, rename, chdir}
stat.*
fnmatch.{fnmatch, fnmatchcase}
random.{seed, sample}
Because quite some library modules are now (partially) supported, I moved all of them to a separate 'lib' directory. Because the ugly '_' in filenames is not needed anymore, this makes it much easier to add to the set of libraries supported by Shed Skin (hint, hint!) If you are interested in doing so, please have a look at the updated README file.
The os.path.* and stat.* support was added by running Shed Skin over (slightly modified) pure Python implementations, taken from the PyPy project. I am getting more and more optimistic about this approach, improving the amount of supported library functions, helping me to locate bugs and motivating me to fix them all at the same time. The next module I may look into is the 're' module, which should help me locate a few more bugs, and help me to add support for other modules that make use of it. Please let me know if you're interested in helping out increasing the number of supported libraries, as there's probably lots of low-hanging fruit.
Most of the newly supported functionality was added in anticipation of compiling an interesting program I found. After messing around with Amarok, Gtkpod, Gnu-pod and what not, I finally found a program to reprogram the database on Apple's latest iPod shuffle (the 15.5 gram 1 GB one :D) that actually worked. Needless to say, it was written in Python.. :-) One interesting application is to put it on the shuffle itself, so you can run it from any computer. The downside is the dependency on CPython. Looking through the code, at about 600 lines, it looked like a potential victim for Shed Skin. The author agreed, and hopefully Shed Skin generated code will be on many iPod's in the near future :-) Here's the link to the program:
http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/
For starters, I updated Shed Skin to work with the newly released Python version 2.5. As part of this, I added support for the new 'any' and 'all' keywords and for conditional expressions. The new Shed Skin release (0.0.15) also comes with support for several, previously unsupported library functions. IIRC, these are:
os.path.{split, splitext, islink, isdir, isfile, exists}
os.{stat, lstat, rename, chdir}
stat.*
fnmatch.{fnmatch, fnmatchcase}
random.{seed, sample}
Because quite some library modules are now (partially) supported, I moved all of them to a separate 'lib' directory. Because the ugly '_' in filenames is not needed anymore, this makes it much easier to add to the set of libraries supported by Shed Skin (hint, hint!) If you are interested in doing so, please have a look at the updated README file.
The os.path.* and stat.* support was added by running Shed Skin over (slightly modified) pure Python implementations, taken from the PyPy project. I am getting more and more optimistic about this approach, improving the amount of supported library functions, helping me to locate bugs and motivating me to fix them all at the same time. The next module I may look into is the 're' module, which should help me locate a few more bugs, and help me to add support for other modules that make use of it. Please let me know if you're interested in helping out increasing the number of supported libraries, as there's probably lots of low-hanging fruit.
Most of the newly supported functionality was added in anticipation of compiling an interesting program I found. After messing around with Amarok, Gtkpod, Gnu-pod and what not, I finally found a program to reprogram the database on Apple's latest iPod shuffle (the 15.5 gram 1 GB one :D) that actually worked. Needless to say, it was written in Python.. :-) One interesting application is to put it on the shuffle itself, so you can run it from any computer. The downside is the dependency on CPython. Looking through the code, at about 600 lines, it looked like a potential victim for Shed Skin. The author agreed, and hopefully Shed Skin generated code will be on many iPod's in the near future :-) Here's the link to the program:
http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/
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