CPython sprint, september 2016

I was invited at my first Cpython sprint in September! Five days, September 5-9, at Instagram office in California, USA. The sprint was sponsored by Instagram, Microsoft, and the PSF.

First little game:Many happy faces, but Where is Victor?

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IMHO it was the most productive CPython week ever :-) Having Guido van Rossum in a room helped to get many PEPs accepted. Having a lot of highly skilled reviewers in the same room helped to get many new features and many PEP implementations merged much faster than usual.

Second little game:try to spot the sprint on the CPython commit statistics of the last 12 months (Feb, 2016-Feb, 2017) ;-)

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Compact dict

Issue #27350: I reviewed and pushed the "compact dict" implementation which makes Python dictionaries ordered (by insertion order) by default. It reduces the memory usage of dictionaries betwen 20% and 25%.

The implementation was written by INADA Naoki, based on the PyPy implementation, with a design by Raymond Hettinger.

FASTCALL

"Fast calls": Python 3.6 has a new private C API and a new METH_FASTCALL calling convention which avoids temporary tuple for positional arguments and avoids temporary dictionary for keyword arguments. Changes:

Add a new C calling convention: METH_FASTCALL Add _PyArg_ParseStack() function Add _PyCFunction_FastCallKeywords() function: issue #27810 Add _PyObject_FastCallKeywords() function: issue #27830 More efficient CALL_FUNCTION bytecode

I reviewed and pushed: "Rework CALL_FUNCTION* opcodes to produce shorter and more efficient bytecode" (issue #27213).

Patch writen by Demur Rumed, design by Serhiy Storchaka, reviewed by Serhiy Storchaka and me.

PEP 509: Add a private version to dict

Guido approved my PEP 509 "Add a new private version to the builtin dict type".

I pushed the implementation.

PEP 524: Make os.urandom() blocking on linux

I pushed the implementation of my PEP 524: "Make os.urandom() blocking on Linux".

Issue #27776: The os.urandom() function does now block on Linux 3.17 and newer until the system urandom entropy pool is initialized to increase the security.

Read my previous blog post for the painful story behind the PEP: PEP 524: os.urandom() now blocks on Linux .

Asynchronous PEP 525 and 530

Guido van Rossum approved two PEPs of Yury Selivanov:

PEP 525: Asynchronous Generators PEP 530: Asynchronous Comprehensions

I reviewed the huge C implementation with Yury on my side :-)

unicode_escape codec optimization

I reviewed and pushed "Optimize unicode_escape and raw_unicode_escape" (the isue #16334), patch written by Serhiy Storchaka.

Python 3.6 bugfixes

I happily found many issues including a major one: regular list-comprehension were completely broken :-)

Another minor issue: SyntaxError didn't reported the correct line number in a specific case.

Don't worry, Yury fixed both ;-)

Official sprint report

Read also the official report: Python Core Development Sprint 2016: 3.6 and beyond! .