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Contributing to the GraalVM Implementation of Python

Thanks for considering to contribute! To get you started, here is a bit of information about the structure of this implementation.

But first...

You will need to sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement for us to be able to merge your work.

Please also take some time to review our code of conduct for contributors.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is to set up mx. This is the build tool we use to develop GraalVM languages. You also need LLVM 6, including the opt tool -- the latter is not included on macOS by default, here you can install the homebrew version of LLVM, which includes this tool. Note that you can use any JDK, and do not necessarily need GraalVM for development. In that case you'll only be able to run without the just-in-time compiler, but that can be fine for making and testing changes that are not performance sensitive.

Once you have mx on your PATH, you can run mx build in this repository. This will initially download the required dependencies next to the repository and build Python. If it succeeds without errors, you should already be able to run mx python and get a REPL.

If you just want to copy and paste some commands, these should get you started:

$ git clone https://github.com/graalvm/mx.git
$ git clone https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython.git
$ cd graalpython
$ ../mx/mx build
$ ../mx/mx python -c "print(42)"

For development, we recommend running mx ideinit next. This will generate configurations for Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Netbeans so that you can open the projects in these IDEs. If you use another editor with support for the Eclipse language server we also had reports of useable development setups with that, but it's not something we support.

Development layout

Besides the source code of the Python interpreter, we have some useful mx functions defined under the mx.graalpython directory. As you make changes, you can test always test them with mx build && mx python. Additionally, there are various "gates" that we use on our CI systems to check any code that goes in. You can run all of these using mx python-gate or just some by using mx python-gate --tags [TAG]. Two interesting gates to run that cover most things are:

  • python-unittest - Run the unittests written in Python, including those for the C extension API
  • python-license - Check that all files have the correct copyright headers applied to them
Builtin modules and classes

For the most part, builtin modules and classes are implemented in the com.oracle.graal.python.builtins package. For each module or class, there's Java class annoted with @CoreFunctions. Each function in a module or a class is implemented in a Node annotated with @Builtin. Take a look at the existing implementations to get a feel for how this is done. For now, when adding new classes or modules, they need to be added to the list in com.oracle.graal.python.builtins.Python3Core.

Some builtin functions, modules, and classes are implemented in pure Python. The files for this are in graalpython/lib-graalpython. These files are listed in the Java com.oracle.graal.python.builtins.Python3Core class. Take a look at these files to see what they do. If a file is called exactly as a built-in module is, it is executed in the context of that module during startup, so some of our modules are implemented both in Java and Python. If the name matches no existing module, the file is executed just for the side-effects.

Python C API

The C implementation and headers for our C API are in graalpython/com.oracle.graal.python.cext. The naming is analogous to C Python's source names. This folder also includes a modules folder for built-in modules that we have adapted from C Python.