making apps, making webs.

TLDR; less performance spikes, faster average performance, PyPy is a good Python for games and multimedia apps on desktop systems, running GC in a thread is a good idea for GIL releasing apps. In March 2018 at the PyPy winter sprint I spent some days working on improving pygame support on PyPy. Part of this was investigating pypy frame drop . In there I found PyPy had both lower average performance in this pygame-using-CPython-API benchmark, and had spikes which caused frame drops. Remember that in latency sensitive applications performance spikes are not allowed. Note that not very much of this code is pure python (where PyPy is fastest), so it's almost a worst case benchmark for PyPy performance. Thanks to Antonio, the PyPy team and their supporters — things have much improved since then. One improvement in particular is that PyPy now allows more control of when the Garbage Collection does its work. Read more about it in the blog post " PyPy for low latency systems &q

#yearofthedesktop is a long running joke in FLOSS communities. When will Linux be more popular than Windows on the Desktop? (please hold back your laughter until the end). Let me explain why this is the Year of the Desktop, and why community developed software will win (and in fact has already). TLDR; most PC hardware vendors are shipping Linux machines, Linux had the best cheap laptop of the year, Linux is a good platform for games, Steam now supports 1000s of Windows apps(+ 5000 linux native) and is contributing to Wine, the web is a good high quality desktop software target, government support for Linux desktop is increasing, and even Microsoft is supporting running Linux software on Windows, cheap hardware like Raspberry Pi(and more) is available and usable, community software cares about usability and has a supporting financial model, community development is a kinder place, fragmentation of the Desktop is no more, Gnome receives $1,000,000 donation, governments spe