PyPy Development: PyPy v7.2 released

The PyPy team is proud to release the version 7.2.0 of PyPy, which includes two different interpreters:

• PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7 including the stdlib for CPython 2.7.13

• PyPy3.6: which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 3.6, including the stdlib for CPython 3.6.9.

The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the double release.

As always, this release is 100% compatible with the previous one and fixed several issues and bugs raised by the growing community of PyPy users. We strongly recommend updating. Many of the fixes are the direct result of end-user bug reports, so please continue reporting issues as they crop up.

You can download the v7.2 releases here:

http://pypy.org/download.html

With the support of Arm Holdings Ltd. and Crossbar.io, this release supports the 64-bit aarch64 ARM architecture. More about the work and the performance data around this welcome development can be found in the blog post.

This release removes the “beta” tag from PyPy3.6. While there may still be some small corner-case incompatibilities (around the exact error messages in exceptions and the handling of faulty codec errorhandlers) we are happy with the quality of the 3.6 series and are looking forward to working on a Python 3.7 interpreter.

We updated our benchmark runner at https://speed.pypy.org to a more modern machine and updated the baseline python to CPython 2.7.11. Thanks to Baroque Software for maintaining the benchmark runner.

The CFFI-based _ssl module was backported to PyPy2.7 and updated to use cryptography version 2.7. Additionally, the _hashlib, and crypt (or _crypt on Python3) modules were converted to CFFI. This has two consequences: end users and packagers can more easily update these libraries for their platform by executing (cd lib_pypy; ../bin/pypy _*_build.py). More significantly, since PyPy itself links to fewer system shared objects (DLLs), on platforms with a single runtime namespace like linux, different CFFI and c-extension modules can load different versions of the same shared object into PyPy without collision (issue 2617).

Until downstream providers begin to distribute c-extension builds with PyPy, we have made packages for some common packages available as wheels.

The CFFI backend has been updated to version 1.13.0. We recommend using CFFI rather than c-extensions to interact with C, and cppyy for interacting with C++ code.

Thanks to Anvil, we revived the PyPy Sandbox, (soon to be released) which allows total control over a Python interpreter’s interactions with the external world.

We implemented a new JSON decoder that is much faster, uses less memory, and uses a JIT-friendly specialized dictionary. More about that in the recent blog post

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project. If PyPy is not quite good enough for your needs, we are available for direct consulting work.
We would also like to thank our contributors and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, tweaking popular modules to run on PyPy, or general help with making RPython’s JIT even better. Since the previous release, we have accepted contributions from 27 new contributors, so thanks for pitching in.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7, 3.6. It’s fast (PyPy and CPython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

We also welcome developers of other dynamic languages to see what RPython can do for them.

This PyPy release supports:

• x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bit, Mac OS X 64-bit, Windows 32-bit, OpenBSD, FreeBSD)

• big- and little-endian variants of PPC64 running Linux

• s390x running Linux

• 64-bit ARM machines running Linux

Unfortunately at the moment of writing our ARM buildbots are out of service, so for now we are not releasing any binary for the ARM architecture (32-bit), although PyPy does support ARM 32-bit processors.

What else is new?

PyPy 7.1 was released in March, 2019. There are many incremental improvements to RPython and PyPy, For more information about the 7.2.0 release, see the full changelog.

Please update, and continue to help us make PyPy better.

Cheers,
The PyPy team

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