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Interesting hosting provider: Digital Ocean
I just set up a bare-bones website for Pyston, which as of the time of this writing is just hosting the pyston-dev mailing list. When setting it up, I wanted a new cloud VM to serve it; my current one, which is serving the blog you’re currently reading, certainly has the capacity to run the […]
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Video: someone routing a full ARM SOM
I have no idea how to judge the quality of this work, but I thought the video was still very interesting: it’s a time-lapse video of someone routing a relatively-complicated ARM system-on-module. I found it interesting because I think it’s always instructive to see how other people work, which is something that I haven’t been […]
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Space Monkey’s migration from Python to Go
Pretty interesting writeup (including a reference to Pyston!): https://www.spacemonkey.com/blog/posts/go-space-monkey. I’m sure I’m primed to read it this way, but it sounds similar to what we sometimes go through at Dropbox or in my personal projects: trying to optimize a Python program, and getting to the point that it’s simply bottlenecked on the performance of a large […]
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JTAG programmer optimizations
In a recent post I talked about my first custom FPGA board and trying to get it up and running; the summary was that 1) my custom jtag programmer didn’t work right away with the FPGA, and 2) my jtag programming setup is very slow. I solved the first problem in that past, and spent a […]
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ICBD: static type inference and compilation for Python
I’ve just released the source code to icbd, which is the predecessor to Pyston. The project is dead now (though the code works and could be picked up by anyone sufficiently interested), but I thought it might be of interest. (Also, it runs slower in PyPy than in CPython, so I wanted to give it […]
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Pyston FAQ
This is the first time I’ve ever gotten enough questions about something to put together something that can honestly be called an FAQ and not a What-I-Think-You-Might-Want-To-Know; here are some questions that seem to come up often: Why does Pyston target Python 2.7? Pyston is initially targeting Python 2.7 because that’s what Dropbox uses […]
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First FPGA board: it’s all about JTAG
Well, I finally sort-of accomplished one of my original goals: designing and building a custom FPGA board. The reason it took a while, and somewhat separately also the reason I can’t use it very much, are both due to JTAG issues. Here’s a picture in all its low-res glory: Without getting too much into the […]
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BGA update: first successes!
As the title suggests, I successfully reflowed my first BGA chips today. I followed the seemingly-easy steps from the last post, and the board correctly enumerated! In a decent bit of thinking ahead, I not only connected the JTAG pins to the header, but I also paired up all CPLD IOs so that I could […]
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BGA update: some good news, mostly bad
I blogged a couple times about how I was attempting to do BGA soldering at home using my toaster oven. The last post ended with me being stumped, so I create a few new boards: one with 3.3V JTAG circuitry in case that the previous 1.8V JTAG was the issue — while I had designed my […]
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Pyston: xrange() example
I’ve finally been able to talk about what I’ve been up to at Dropbox: Pyston, a new JIT for Python! You can check out the main announcement here, or the code here. In this post I wanted to go into more detail about a specific example of something that Pyston can handle: for loops. It […]