Favourite student slave labour tasks for python.

-
These are my favourite python ideas from the google summer of code.

Ones that I think will benefit the most people, and affect the most change for the better. Ok, just ones I reckon would be cool.

  • Implement ctypes support for GCC ARM platforms. The underlying issue is lack of closure API support for ARM in libffi. A patch available at [WWW] http://handhelds.org/~pb/arm-libffi.dpatch, that should be hopefully a good starting point. ctypes CVS has a libffi_arm_wince directory, which also seems to support closure API.

  • Make a python+pygame plugin for IE, netscape. CodingProjectIdeas/PythonWebPlugin

  • Psyco for MacOSX. PPC, and universal binary versions. (also psyco for ARM would be cool!!)

  • Research how to get python support into all the cheap webhosts.

  • Security audit of python. Using as many automated processes as possible.
  • Python speed up. Reduce memory usage, speedup startup time. The two main speed regressions of the 2.0, 2.1,2.2,2.3,2.4 releases. (438,453,499,771,880) syscalls vs 106 for latest perl. 0m0.031s, 0m0.029s, 0m0.037s, 0m0.059s, 0m0.057s real time to start vs 0m0.007s for the latest perl.
  • Code coverage. (there are a few suggestions for code coverage).
  • Improve thread performance. (reducing memory usage will probably help thread performance the most)

The memory usage, and start up times would be great to improve. As I think these are the things which make people avoid using processes. Processes give us protection, and are a great way at keeping parts separate. However if processes are so expensive to use in python, then other means will be used instead.

A security audit would be wonderful. I'm not sure if a security audit has been done on python, and I'm sure it would lead to a bunch of bug fixes. So a security audit is much in line with using code coverage of tests. I guess a lint, and pychecker would be other good things to add into the python build process.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Draft 3 of, ^Let's write a unit test!^

-
Image
So, I started writing this for people who want to 'contribute' to Community projects, and also Free Libre or Open source projects. Maybe you'd like to get involved, but are unsure of where to begin? Follow along with this tutorial, and peek at the end in the "what is a git for?" section for explanations of what some of the words mean. Draft 1, 2018/07/18 - initial draft. Draft 2, 2019/11/04 - two full unit test examples, assertions, making a pull request, use python 3 unittest substring search, "good first issue" is a thing now. Started "What is a git for? Jargon" section. Draft 3, 2020/12/12 - default branch name is main. What's first? A test is first. A unit test is a piece of code which tests one thing works well in isolation from other parts of software. In this guide, I'm going to explain how to write one using the standard python unittest module, for the pygame game library. You can apply this advice to most python pr...
Read more

Is PostgreSQL good enough?

-
Image
tldr; you can do jobs, queues, real time change feeds, time series, object store, document store, full text search with PostgreSQL. How to, pros/cons, rough performance and complexity levels are all discussed. Many sources and relevant documentation is linked to. Your database is first. But can PostgreSQL be second? Web/app projects these days often have many distributed parts. It's not uncommon for groups to use the right tool for the job. The right tools are often something like the choice below. Redis for queuing, and caching. Elastic Search for searching, and log stash. Influxdb or RRD for timeseries. S3 for an object store. PostgreSQL for relational data with constraints, and validation via schemas. Celery for job queues. Kafka for a buffer of queues or stream processing. Exception logging with PostgreSQL (perhaps using Sentry) KDB for low latency analytics on your column oriented data. Mongo/ZODB for storing documents JSON (or mangodb for /dev/null replacemen...
Read more

post modern C tooling - draft 6

-
Image
Contemporary C tooling for making higher quality C, faster or more safely. DRAFT 0 - 10/11/18,  DRAFT 1 - 9/16/19, 7:19 PM, I'm still working on this, but it's already useful and I'd like some feedback - so I decided to share it early. DRAFT 2 - 10/1/19, mostly additions to static analysis tools. DRAFT 3 - 10/4/19, updates on build systems, package management, and complexity analysis.  DRAFT 4 - 10/6/19, run time dynamic verification and instrumentation, sanitizers (asan/ubsan/etc), performance tools, static analyzers. DRAFT 5 - C interpreter(s).  DRAFT 6 - 11/6/19 , mention TermDebug vim,  more windows debugging tools, C drawing for intro. In 2001 or so people started using the phrase "Modern C++". So now that it's 2019, I guess we're in the post modern era? Anyway, this isn't a post about C++ code, but some of this information applies there too. No logo, but it's used everywhere. Welcome to the post modern era. S...
Read more