SPy: a new companion static language for Python; thoughts?

Python Help
1

Hello,

Do any of you follow SPy (https://github.com/spylang/spy), the new statically compiled variant of Python created by Antonio Cuni?

I have been looking into it recently and became convinced it could have a significant impact on the Python ecosystem, including for numerical computing and libraries like NumPy. I wrote up my thoughts in a post entitled “SPy: a vision for its impact on the Python community”:

https://fluiddyn.pages.heptapod.net/spy-book/impact-on-python/

I would be very interested to hear what this community thinks, both about SPy itself and about the ideas in the post.

Pierre Augier
(CNRS researcher in fluid mechanics, Grenoble)

2

I’m maintaining several small packages and applications and I think SPy looks very promising.
I typically have a small section of the code where I use dynamic features of python, e.g. to set everything up properly. But I also have a huge chunk of code where I use a very restricted set of python. This code is normally fully annotated with type hints so I am already doing all the hard work. I might as well benefit from the compile time checks and the speed boost.

I guess the success will come down to the ergonomics.
How easy is it to call redshifted python code from “normal” python:
E.g. can I develop a library in SPy with an interface in normal python that I can distribute through pypi?

3

at the moment SPy offers only a limited and low-level way to integrate with CPython: you can compile a spy module using spy build –output-kind=py-cffi and you get a CFFI module which you can then compile and distribute as a CPython extension “as usual”.

The low-level inteface is good enough to pass simple arrays, numbers and structs, but e.g. there is no way to define a custom type.

Eventually, the plan is to write a full SPy/CPython integration layer which will allow to import CPython modules into spy and viceversa, but it’s not there yet.

4

Thanks for your reply. That’s unfortunate but I guess I’ll just have to wait.
Just food for thought:
If there is an easy (and documented) way to call SPy code from CPython I could imagine already trying to port some parts of my libraries and provide real world (SPy beginner) feedback.
I’m aware that you’re at a very early stage and things are more pressing (e.g. I would also require a byte type).

I think it’s a very interesting project and I’ll definitely keep an eye on it.