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by bitcracker 5255 days ago
The fundamental question is: How compatible will PyPy ever be? Which kind of applications can be run with PyPy?

http://pypy.org/compat.html mentions compatiblity according to the standard library. This is fine for (web) servers and command line applications.

But what about desktop applications? Can I (someday) take a PyQt or PyGTK code and compile it with PyPy without modifications?

2 comments

Maybe.

cpyext is a hack to let PyPy run Python/C API modules. It works for some, but not all, and it's slow. I'm sure it'll keep getting better, but not sure if it'll ever be good enough to run PyGTK or PyQt.

PyPy has good support for ctypes, so ctypes bindings are a good option. There are projects out there like pygir-ctypes and ctypes-gtk. One of them just needs to become complete enough to be a good choice for GTK programming. Compatibility with new PyGObject is more likely than compatibility with legacy PyGTK, though.

PyQt is harder because it's C++.

I believe that C extensions, which have always been and still are very CPython specific, will have to be replaced with ctypes and possibly Cython versions eventually.

I expect to see quite a lot of improvement in that area as a side effect of the work on numpy.