08:30 <Hodgestar> cfbolz: Do you perhaps have a standard set of starting references on mondern dynamic language implementations that you could point DuToit at?

08:31 <Hodgestar> fangerer: And the same question but perhaps specifically for Graal?

08:34 <fangerer> If DuToit wants to learn about GraalPython's implementation, then yes. Is that what you mean?

08:45 <Hodgestar> fangerer: Yep!

08:49 <GianlucaRizzo> Hey everyone, I'm Gianluca Rizzo, a computer science honours student from UCT. I'm working with Du Toit on HPy for my honours project. I'm looking forward to working on it, it seems very interesting!

11:49 <cfbolz> Hodgestar: any specific direction? Roughly how many papers?

11:52 <cfbolz> There is no good annotated bibliography. One approach is to follow the references in these slides: https://t.co/fuAzCHxy4u

11:53 <Hodgestar> cfbolz: DuToit and Gianluca are doing literature reviews before beginning their investigating-hpy-performance projects. I was thinking something like one or two review papers that link to lots of other papers. DuToit and Gianluca can ask for more guidance later if they need it.

11:53 <Hodgestar> cfbolz: Perfect!

11:54 <cfbolz> There's a somewhat dated but still very interesting survey paper by John Aycock, 'A Brief History of just in time' is the title i think

12:49 <antocuni> back from PyCon DE and reading the backlog of messages, so I am probably late for replying

12:50 <cfbolz> antocuni: how was pyconde?

12:50 <antocuni> but about the debug mode, it depends whether we want to allow per-module debug mode or not. If think we should, unless there are very good reasons to avoid it

12:51 <antocuni> for example, if I am debugging my own module, I don't want to turn on debugging for other unrelated modules

12:51 <antocuni> (or maybe there are cases where I want, but that should not be enforced, IMHO)

12:52 <antocuni> so we also need a way to specify for which modules we want to enable the debug mode. At a first approximation, I think an ENV var can be fin

12:52 <antocuni> fine

12:52 <antocuni> e.g., HPY_DEBUG=numpy,scipy python foo.py

12:53 <antocuni> then if we want to be advanced we can also provide command line arguments, .ini files, and a way to specify them from python

12:53 <antocuni> cfbolz: very very good

12:53 <antocuni> it was a good feeling to be back to in-person conferences

12:55 <Hodgestar> Yay for having a good conference!

12:56 <Hodgestar> Agreed about debug mode being per-module if at all possible. Would HPY_DEBUG=numpy imply debug mode for all modules inside the numpy package?

13:00 <cfbolz> antocuni: awesome

13:00 <antocuni> Hodgestar: good question

13:01 <cfbolz> What were your impressions on the web assembly stuff? Does it have actual use cases or mostly a tech demo?

13:02 <antocuni> my gut feeling is that you should list the exact module name which you are loading, in this case it would be HPY_DEBUG=numpy.core._multiarray (or whatever it's called nowadays)

13:03 <antocuni> but we can also be more advanced and say e.g. HPY_DEUBG=numpy.* maybe?

13:03 <antocuni> cfbolz: I think that for now it's just a demo

13:03 <antocuni> the idea is that CPython could/should support webassembly as an official target

13:04 <antocuni> so that e.g. pyiodide can concentrate with the actual integration with the browser, instead of spending time at fixing CPython to work

13:04 <cfbolz> antocuni: ah richtig

13:04 <cfbolz> Right

13:04 <antocuni> I also think it's still kind of slow, but Christian says that lots of optimizations are possible

13:07 <cfbolz> The only use case I understand is zero install education

14:27 <antocuni> there is also jupyterlite, which if I understand correctly it's like jupyter notebook but runs entirely client side

14:33 <cfbolz> antocuni: yeah, that's kind of what I meant

22:51 <Hodgestar> Zero install (or really install-so-easy-you-can-miss-it) is pretty compelling in non-educational contexts too (e.g. in a lot of businesses getting non-devs or even non-scientific Python devs to install jupyter-notebook plus tools is large mountain to climb).

22:53 <Hodgestar> But running in a browser does come with many downsides and making building and install packages easier solves some of the installation problem from a different direction.

22:54 <Hodgestar> I think it's good that people are doing some strange things which might be really useful if they pan out. :)