Building PyPy is easy

The moment I saw a benchmark on PyPy 3.5 I was eager to test it. PyPy 3.5 support is still in development so I had to build it before trying it.

PyPy is hosted on bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy and thus requires mercurial to clone it:

$ apt install mercurial
$ hg clone https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy

Now let's checkout the py3.5 branch:

$ cd pypy
$ hg up py3.5

Before building the pypy I had some missing dependencies on my Debian 8 system:

$ apt install pypy libbz2-dev libexpat1-dev libffi-dev pkg-config libncurses5-dev

Yes, pypy build process requires an older version of pypy :D Although, docs say that it should be possible to build i with CPython.

Anyway, now we're ready to build the pypy and that's as easy as executing:

$ rpython/bin/rpython -Ojit pypy/goal/targetpypystandalone.py

Eventually, on my computer after 37 minutes, there will be pypy-c which is your Python interpreter/JIT.