HN.zip

RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython

68 points by lumpa - 8 comments
ironhaven [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What RISC-V extensions is this built for? There is a target triple of riscv64-unknown-linux-gnu listed so i assume the baseline RV64GC that the Linux kernel is built against.

It makes sense to be conservative with a new architecture but new high performance RISC-V cores such as from SiFive[1] are going to meet RVA23. That standard has vector and bit manipulation extensions that could be used to improve performance with a python interpreter. I guess more testing needs to be done to see if raising the bar is useful.

[1]https://www.sifive.com/cores/performance-p800

yjftsjthsd-h [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython as a tier 3 platform!

That's significant, but tier 3 is still a caveat. Still allowed to break without blocking anything or being fixed as a priority.

jmalicki [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sure, but I had to look:

Tier1: Windows x64/i686, Linux x64/ARM gcc, Darwin/ARM

Tier2: Linux x64/ARM w/ clang, Windows ARM, WASM, Darwin/x64

Tier3 is a pretty low support level, but tiers 1 and 2 is a pretty short list of major commercial platforms. Also even for developers to fix, availability of e.g. RiscV machines in the cloud to reproduce and fix on is still somewhat limited.

phire [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Needs to start somewhere.

Looks like the most important step towards tier two is mostly about proving the CI infrastructure is reliable (which takes time at tier 3), and have at least two core developers committed to fixing any issues (within 24 hours)

boredatoms [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Atleast CI-class hardware finally exists, with the sifive bigsky

https://www.sifive.com/development-platforms/sifive-bigsky-s...

digkls [3 hidden]5 mins ago
RISC-V is one of those experimental architectures that hardly anyone is actually using, isn't it?

Tier 3, or no support at all, seems an appropriate designation.

boredatoms [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not much on user facing OS, but billions of small controllers
yjftsjthsd-h [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't think CPython targets those, though; that seems more like a micropython thing?