Pkgng packages for all supported FreeBSD versions will be provided in due course.

Building PyPy can be done using the Ports Collection or directly from source. The former is recommended.

The PyPy build process has two phases:

• The translation phase converts the language interpreter, written in RPython, into C code. This is done using a python interpreter (currently either cPython or PyPy). This is a single thread task.
• The compilation phase compiles the C code into a single executable. This is a highly parallel task.

See below for detailed discussions on the various aspects of building PyPy.

To install PyPy from ports:

# make -C /usr/ports/lang/pypy install

Building PyPy requires a lot of memory. Most systems are not capable of building PyPy, if this applies to your system please consider using a package as listed above. PyPy is also capable of building itself which, thanks to the JIT, is faster than using Python but also uses more memory. This behaviour is a port option, dependent on ${LOCALBASE}/bin/pypy being present.

By default PyPy builds all instances in parallel which stacks the required memory (i.e. each build will use the maximum memory listed below). If your system has sufficient memory to build one PyPy instance but not multiple instances use the build flag -DDISABLE_MAKE_JOBS to build the PyPy instances in series.

The PyPy port checks if your system has sufficient memory and refuses to build if it detects insufficient memory. This behaviour can be overwritten with the build flag -DPYPY_IGNORE_MEMORY. Each extra level of optimisation requires more memory when building PyPy, with the JIT taking the most memory, so consider using a lower level of optimisation if memory is a limitation and disabling the memory checks however the primary reason to use PyPy is for the JIT and the associated performance improvements.

The following memory requirements were determined using sh -c "rm -f /tmp/stop; (while [ ! -f /tmp/stop ]; do ps -o rss,comm | grep -R '(python|pypy)'; sleep 1; done) | sort -n | tail -n 1" on an x86_64 system for building the DEFAULT instance:

See ${PORTSDIR}/lang/pypy/Makefile for more accurate figures.

PyPy takes a long time to build. The “translation” phase of building PyPy can take most of the time. If concurrency is disables, via -DDISABLE_MAKE_JOBS, then the compilation phase can also take a signification amount of time.

Each instance built can be translated concurrently if concurrency is not disabled.

The following times are based on an Intel Core i7-2600 (4 physical cores + hyper-threading = 8 logical cores) for building the DEFAULT instance:

See instructions provided by the PyPy project on building PyPy directly from source.

• Detect MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER and use min(MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER, COUNT(PYPY_INST)) when detecting memory requirements.
• Make a pypy-devel port (of nightlies, for fixing pypy on FreeBSD)
• Make a jitviewer port (depends pn flask pygments simplejson Jinja2 Werkzeug)
• Support valgrind
• Properly check sandbox support and create sandbox VM-thing
• Integrate PyPy into bsd.python.mk