Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Binary wheels for PyPy

Hi,

this is a short blog post, just to announce the existence of this Github repository, which contains binary PyPy wheels for some selected packages. The availability of binary wheels means that you can install the packages much more quickly, without having to wait for compilation.

At the moment of writing, these packages are available:

  • numpy
  • scipy
  • pandas
  • psutil
  • netifaces

For now, we provide only wheels built on Ubuntu, compiled for PyPy 5.8.
In particular, it is worth noting that they are not manylinux1 wheels, which means they could not work on other Linux distributions. For more information, see the explanation in the README of the above repo.

Moreover, the existence of the wheels does not guarantee that they work correctly 100% of the time. they still depend on cpyext, our C-API emulation layer, which is still work-in-progress, although it has become better and better during the last months. Again, the wheels are there only to save compilation time.

To install a package from the wheel repository, you can invoke pip like this:

$ pip install --extra-index https://antocuni.github.io/pypy-wheels/ubuntu numpy

Happy installing!