Hello.
PyPy has seen some dramatic progress in the past year with each release
delivering roughly 30% speed improvements over the previous one. I think
with a roughly 3-month release cycle, this is a pretty good achievement and
you haven't seen all of it yet :) We have quite a few improvements in process,
with the current trunk already showing faster performance than 1.7, even
though only a month has passed.
It might be worth mentioning that PyPy has many facets and progress is done
by multiple people in various directions. Examples include:
- STM work done by Armin, read details
- NumPy speed improvements, done mostly by Alex Gaynor and myself
- NumPy completeness, done by a lot of people, including myself, Alex, Matti
Picus and some others, if you're interested in this progressing faster, feel
free to donate towards NumPy on PyPy - Specialized object-instances, worked by Carl Friedrich Bolz and
Lukas Diekmann and various other specialized types - ARM JIT backend, work by David Schneider and Armin
- PPC JIT backend, work by Sven Hager and David Edelsohn, with help from
David Schneider - Speed improvements, done by everyone
Overall this is about 30 commits daily -- quite a bit of activity.