Hello world in psyco

Aristotle said (presumably in Greek), "that which we learn, we learn by doing". In other words, there comes a point, rather quickly, when reading the manual (or even the code) is mostly waste of time :-) The only way, imo, to understand a complex program like pypy or psyco, is to run the program. So installing from sources is imperative, because we want to change the source and see what happens :-)

I've just built psyco with a "hello world" message at startup. Some notes:

- There is no point in trying to build the docs. You will simply get the psyco guide And a good thing too. The make file for the docs using something called mkhowto. Googling shows this may be part of Python tools, but there is no obvious way to get mkhowto on ubuntu.

- It looks like running "sudo python setup.py" install will do a proper build (make) of changed sources. The docs say this:

[quote]
As usual, other commands are available, e.g.

    python setup.py build_ext -i

will compile the C source and put the result directly into the py-support/ subdirectory (no administrator priviledge is required).
[end quote]

In my case, I don't mind destroying psyco by mistake, so maybe I'll just go with the plain vanilla install.

Anyway, I now have a version of psyco that I can play with. After 8 years working only with Python, I had forgotten quirks of C and Make, but the irritations, though real, are minor.

The next step will be to investigate the existing tracing and debugging capabilities of psyco.

One "significant" (if hardly earth-shaking) improvement to psyco would be to add Sherlock tracing. This would be good for development: it allows enabling and disabling of traces from the command line with minimal overhead during testing and no overhead in production.