Hacker News Reader

That sounds great. Does it have any drawbacks like a high startup time?

I just tried it. On first start up (when the 13MB pypy executable has to be loaded into memory), it's slightly slower. About 0.5 to 1.0 seconds, I'd guess.

My highly scientific benchmarks (time python -c "pass") give no noticeable difference, with pypy starting in between 0.015s and 0.020s and Python 2.6 starting in 0.022s to 0.028s.

All of this is on a 1.6GHz C2D, 1GB RAM, Arch Linux 32 bit.

13MB? Seems like a lot. I think the full IDE, plus version control and all base libraries fits into a 14MB VisualWorks Smalltalk image. (Plus, if you disabled the splash screen and herald WAV, it would start faster than Perl 5.) Executable used to be way smaller than 1MB.

Last time I checked, PyPy was not compatible with modules written in C for CPython. IIRC, they wanted to correct that.

I believe they have alpha support now, but it's still very buggy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com