hpy 0.9.0: Fourth public release
I'm excited to announce that HPy 0.9 was recently released! The fourth official HPy release comes with many new features and was again made available on PyPI.
This is the first release that also provides binary wheels, so installation is now fast and smooth as you expect it.
The major highlights of the release are support for subclassing of built-in types, metaclasses, the trace mode, multi-phase module initialization, and the hybrid ABI. Please checkout the full release notes here on GitHub: https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy/releases/tag/0.9.0
Also, we invested a lot of effort to improve official documentation.
Great news too is that this release was used to make a first (partially-migrated) port of NumPy, we call it NumPy/HPy, run some examples.
What is HPy?¶
HPy provides a new API for extending Python in C. In other words, you use
#include <hpy.h> instead of #include <Python.h>. For more info, look at
the
official documentation.
Installation¶
HPy 0.9 is best tested on Linux and Mac OS X systems but there is also initial
support for Windows (both x86_64). For CPython, you need to install it
manually, using pip:
$ pip install hpy==0.9.0
PyPy and GraalPy usually already come with intrinsic HPy support, so no installation is necessary. HPy 0.9 is already included in GraalPy 23.1. Unfortunately, due to lack of resources, development is still in progress for PyPy but should be finished soon.
Also checkout PyPy's nightly builds to follow the progress:
To check the version of HPy which is shipped with those, you can either use
pip or hpy.universal.get_version().
Major Features¶
- Support subclasses of built-in types
It is now possible to create pure HPy types that inherit from built-in types like type or float. This was already possible before but in a very limited way, i.e., by setting HPyType_Spec.basicsize to 0. In this case, the type implicitly inherited the basic size of the supertype but that also means that you cannot have a custom C struct. It is now possible inherit from a built-in type AND have a custom C struct. For further reference, see HPyType_Spec.builtin_shape and HPyType_BuiltinShape.
- Support for metaclasses
HPy now supports creating types with metaclasses. This can be done by passing type specification parameter with kind HPyType_SpecParam_Metaclass when calling HPyType_FromSpec.
In addition to CPython ABI and HPy Universal ABI, we now introduced the Hybrid ABI. The major difference is that whenever you use a legacy API like HPy_AsPyObject or HPy_FromPyObject, the prdouced binary will then be specific to one interpreter. This was necessary to ensure that universal binaries are really portable and can be used on any HPy-capable interpreter.
Similar to the Debug Mode, HPy now provides the Trace Mode that can be enabled at runtime and helps analyzing API usage and identifying performance issues.
HPy now support multi-phase module initialization which is an important feature in particular needed for two important use cases: (1) module state support (which is planned to be introduced in the next major release), and (2) subinterpreters. We decided to drop support for single-phase module initialization since this makes the API cleaner and easier to use.
- HPy Calling Protocol
This was a big missing piece and is now eventually available. It enables slot HPy_tp_call, which can now be used in the HPy type specification. We decided to use a calling convention similar to CPython's vectorcall calling convention. This is: the arguments are passed in a C array and the keyword argument names are provided as a Python tuple. Before this release, the only way to create a callable type was to set the special method __call__. However, this has several disadvantages. In particlar, poor performance on CPython (and maybe other implementations) and it was not possible to have specialized call function implementations per object (see HPy_SetCallFunction)
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