PyPy v7.0.0: triple release of 2.7, 3.5 and 3.6-alpha

The PyPy team is proud to release the version 7.0.0 of PyPy, which includes three different interpreters:

  • PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7
  • PyPy3.5, which supports Python 3.5
  • PyPy3.6-alpha: this is the first official release of PyPy to support 3.6 features, although it is still considered alpha quality.

All the interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the triple release.

Until we can work with downstream providers to distribute builds with PyPy, we have made packages for some common packages available as wheels.

The GC hooks , which can be used to gain more insights into its performance, has been improved and it is now possible to manually manage the GC by using a combination of gc.disable and gc.collect_step. See the GC blog post.

We updated the cffi module included in PyPy to version 1.12, and the cppyy backend to 1.4. Please use these to wrap your C and C++ code, respectively, for a JIT friendly experience.

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.

The PyPy3.6 release and the Windows PyPy3.5 release are still not production quality so your mileage may vary. There are open issues with incomplete compatibility and c-extension support.

The utf8 branch that changes internal representation of unicode to utf8 did not make it into the release, so there is still more goodness coming. You can download the v7.0 releases here:

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.

What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7, 3.5 and 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.

The PyPy release supports:

  • x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD)
  • big- and little-endian variants of PPC64 running Linux,
  • s390x 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.

Changelog

If not specified, the changes are shared across versions

  • Support __set_name__, __init_subclass__ (Py3.6)
  • Support cppyy in Py3.5 and Py3.6
  • Use implementation-specific site directories in sysconfig (Py3.5, Py3.6)
  • Adding detection of gcc to sysconfig (Py3.5, Py3.6)
  • Fix multiprocessing regression on newer glibcs
  • Make sure ‘blocking-ness’ of socket is set along with default timeout
  • Include crypt.h for crypt() on Linux
  • Improve and re-organize the contributing documentation
  • Make the __module__ attribute writable, fixing an incompatibility with NumPy 1.16
  • Implement Py_ReprEnter, Py_ReprLeave(), ``PyMarshal_ReadObjectFromString, PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString, PyObject_DelItemString, PyMapping_DelItem, PyMapping_DelItemString, PyEval_GetFrame, PyOS_InputHook, PyErr_FormatFromCause (Py3.6),
  • Implement new wordcode instruction encoding (Py3.6)
  • Log additional gc-minor and gc-collect-step info in the PYPYLOG
  • The reverse-debugger (revdb) branch has been merged to the default branch, so it should always be up-to-date. You still need a special pypy build, but you can compile it from the same source as the one we distribute for the v7.0.0 release. For more information, see https://bitbucket.org/pypy/revdb
  • Support underscores in numerical literals like '4_2' (Py3.6)
  • Pre-emptively raise MemoryError if the size of dequeue in _collections.deque is too large (Py3.5)
  • Fix multithreading issues in calls to os.setenv
  • Add missing defines and typedefs for numpy and pandas on MSVC
  • Add CPython macros like Py_NAN to header files
  • Rename the MethodType to instancemethod, like CPython
  • Better support for async with in generators (Py3.5, Py3.6)
  • Improve the performance of pow(a, b, c) if c is a large integer
  • Now vmprof works on FreeBSD
  • Support GNU Hurd, fixes for FreeBSD
  • Add deprecation warning if type of result of __float__ is float inherited class (Py3.6)
  • Fix async generator bug when yielding a StopIteration (Py3.6)
  • Speed up max(list-of-int) from non-jitted code
  • Fix Windows os.listdir() for some cases (see CPython #32539)
  • Add select.PIPE_BUF
  • Use subprocess to avoid shell injection in shutil module - backport of https://bugs.python.org/issue34540
  • Rename _Py_ZeroStruct to _Py_FalseStruct (Py3.5, Py3.6)
  • Remove some cpyext names for Py3.5, Py3.6
  • Enable use of unicode file names in dlopen
  • Backport CPython fix for thread.RLock
  • Make GC hooks measure time in seconds (as opposed to an opaque unit)
  • Refactor and reorganize tests in test_lib_pypy
  • Check error values in socket.setblocking (Py3.6)
  • Add support for FsPath to os.unlink() (Py3.6)
  • Fix freezing builtin modules at translation
  • Tweak W_UnicodeDictionaryStrategy which speeds up dictionaries with only unicode keys

We also refactored many parts of the JIT bridge optimizations, as well as cpyext internals, and together with new contributors fixed issues, added new documentation, and cleaned up the codebase.