HPy @ Python Language Summit

Yesterday I had the privilege to give a talk about HPy (sildes) at the Python Language Summit 2021.

The organizers of the summit will soon publish a full report about the event (edit: now available here), but for the HPy-specific part, we got generally good feedback. Someone has a few concerns that if CPython is to change the API, HPy might not be going far enough. Others said that Python shouldn't wait for the "perfect" API if HPy can be the "good" one that helps it evolve.

Everyone was open to have HPy-compatible wheels on PyPI, once the HPy Universal ABI stays relatively stable. Many people suggested that we should really write a PEP to propose HPy as a "semi-official" API for Python.

An interesting question was about which are the VM optimizations which are compatible with the HPy API. The following is a non-exhaustive list of things which are known to work because they already used by PyPy and/or GraalPython:

• JIT compiler
• moving/compacting GCs
• storage strategies
• maps (also known as "hidden classes")

One notable missing optimization from the list above is tagged pointers. Currently there is no implementation which uses tagged pointers and supports HPy. However, we don't think there is any fundamental design issue in HPy which would prevent it: if you turn tagged pointers into "tagged handles", things should just work out of the box.