On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:50, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/27 Collin Winter <coll...@gmail.com>: > > In particular, Windows support is one of those things we'll need to > > address on our end. LLVM's Windows support may be spotty, or there may > > be other Windows issues we inadvertently introduce. None of the three > > of us have Windows machines, nor do we particularly want to acquire > > them :), and Windows support isn't going to be a big priority. If we > > find that some of our patches have Windows issues, we will certainly > > fix those before proposing their inclusion in CPython. > > On the assumption (sorry, I've done little more than read the press > releases so far) that you're starting from the CPython base and > incrementally patching things, you currently have strong Windows > support. It would be a shame if that got gradually chipped away > through neglect, until it became a big job to reinstate it. > > If the Unladen Swallow team doesn't include any Windows developers, > you're a bit stuck, I guess, but could you not at least have a Windows > buildbot which keeps tabs on the current status? Then you might > encourage interested Windows bystanders to check in occasionally and > maybe offer fixes. > > As things stand, the press releases give me the impression (as a > Windows user without a lot of time to invest in contributing) that > this project is irrelevant to me, and I should ignore it until you > announce "proper" Windows support. By which time, it may have fallen > completely off my radar. (On a smaller scale, this happened with > virtualenv - I found to my surprise that it now supported Windows, and > had for some time without me realising, because when it started it was > Unix-only and I had not bothered to keep track of it). Maybe again > it's something that could be clarified in the announcements. It's not a matter of chipping away support. It's a matter of wishing to not write our own JIT, but rather leverage other people's work. That currently means LLVM, but LLVM has a weak Windows story at the moment. Of course, LLVM has little Windows support because it doesn't have any Windows users :-) The changes done so far are (mostly) orthogonal to Windows (the actual performance benefits may depend a little on the platform), but the future work will not be. On the other hand, getting the Windows story straightened out is mostly a matter of getting Windows support in LLVM, and not work specific to Unladen Swallow; hopefully, we can use some of the Windows knowledge on python-dev or elsewhere in the world for that. Notice how I said 'currently' and 'at the moment' and 'future work'. LLVM is also a work in progress, See, for instance, http://llvm.org/docs/GettingStartedVS.html . (And if we were to write our own JIT, we would have the same problem but worse: none of us would be able to write an effective one for Windows, if at all, and we would have a much smaller developer pool to work with. And it would take much longer in the first place.) -- Thomas Wouters <tho...@python.org> Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!
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