RPython Compilation Quick Reference

Well first things first, this is way more ram hungry than you'd expect, and you're restricted to python 2. BUT, you do end up with nice fast binaries at the end. So let's proceed!

I never remember the incantations you need to compile the code, and both pypy's and rpython's docs have the examples fairly buried under assumptions that you're really just looking to debug the pypy interpreter, if you aren't just looking for a readymade binary of pypy itself. From what I can tell, the main build command that generates pypy has rpython call what they dub a "translation goal". RPython has much more about these translations and how you can perform them interactively with an rpython shell (which is neat), but for our purposes: rpython ≅ compiler, and it just needs to be pointed at a valid translation goal file. Which is luckily just an ordinary python 2 file with a couple specific functions defined like `entry<sub>point</sub>`. The nop (no operation) program for testing that rpython provides is as follows:

"""
A simple standalone target.

The target below specifies None as the argument types list.
This is a case treated specially in driver.py . If the list
of input types is empty, it is meant to be a list of strings,
actually implementing argv of the executable.
"""

def debug(msg):
    print "debug:", msg

# __________  Entry point  __________

def entry_point(argv):
    debug("hello world")
    return 0

# _____ Define and setup target ___

def target(*args):
    return entry_point