Pypy support

[hoplite]

Will pypy be supported at any point? It would be a drop in replacement for the existing python starter kit and add a fair boost of speed for many of the tasks my bot spends a lot of time churning through.

On a side note, the starter kit tries to use psyco which is not supported on 64-bit systems. IIRC the game servers are all 64-bit linux machines.

[tedwards]

Seconds for pypy !

[hexist]

Yes thirds for pypy

[gerg.bowering]

Besides PyPy support for Bots, organisers should consider running the game engine with PyPy as a faster alternative to CPython.

Faster game rate would benefit everyone, not just Python bots.

Update: Just installed and tested the PyPy 1.6 binary release for Win32. The engine performance was not noticably faster using PyPy 1.6 than under PythonC (3.2.2).

Both engine and Python starter bots ran using PyPy without modification, however the current Win32 PyPy build appears to be unstable and crashes frequently. Consequently I would not recommend it for Windows users.

PyPy is developed primarily on Linux, and the Linux builds are stable, so I'd be interested to hear if anyone has tried running games using PyPy on Linux.

[analyst74]

I don't think running starter bots will accurately reflect the performance difference. At least running some reasonably sophisticated bot (i.e. taking a couple hundred ms per turn) will be a better benchmark.

[skuto]

Faster game rate would benefit everyone, not just Python bots.

Game rate has no relation to the speed of the game engine. Pypy wouldn't help game rate except in the very rare circumstances where an actual Python bot is playing and does a fixed amount of work per turn, instead of actually checking the time.

Pypy 1.6 doesn't support numpy, which AFAIK quite a few Python bots are using, so it's tricky to add now. Pypy 1.7 supports it but the code still needs some specific tweaks for Pypy.

So adding Pypy support now would probably be required to treat it like a separate language.

[skuto]

So adding Pypy support now would probably be required to treat it like a separate language.

Looks like that's exactly what happened You can probably submit with .pypy extension now.

[Janzert]

Yes PyPy 1.7 is now supported and live on the servers, was just waiting for it to be released so I could add it.

To use just change your "MyBot.py" to "MyBot.pypy" and it will be run under pypy.

[codetiger]

Does pypy support numpy? AFAIK, it doesn't.

In that case, is pypy faster than python + bumpy?

[codetiger]

I tried submitting my code in pypy.

Two files MyBot.pypy and Ants.pypy. But I get the following error

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "app_main.py", line 51, in run_toplevel
File "MyBot.pypy", line 2, in
from ants import *
ImportError: No module named ants
turn 0 bot 0 crashed

Probably my ants.pypy is not recognized and its the same when I compile on my local machine. If I submit it as MyBot.pypy and ants.py, it works on my local machine but am concerned if it will compile correctly both on pypy.