# PyPy v7.1.0: release of 2.7, and 3.6-beta

The PyPy team is proud to release the version 7.1.0 of PyPy, which includes two different interpreters:

> - PyPy2.7, which is an interpreter supporting the syntax and the features of Python 2.7

> - PyPy3.6-beta: this is the second official release of PyPy to support 3.6 features, although it is still considered beta quality.

The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the double release.

This release, coming fast on the heels of 7.0 in February, finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Removing the conversions from strings to unicode internally lead to a nice speed bump.

We also improved the ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays.

Until we can work with downstream providers to distribute builds with PyPy, we have made packages for some common packages available as wheels.

The CFFI backend has been updated to version 1.12.2. We recommend using CFFI rather than c-extensions to interact with C, and cppyy for interacting with C++ code.

As always, this release is 100% compatible with the previous one and fixed several issues and bugs raised by the growing community of PyPy users. We strongly recommend updating.

The PyPy3.6 release is still not production quality so your mileage may vary. There are open issues with incomplete compatibility and c-extension support.

You can download the v7.1 releases here:

> https://pypy.org/download.html

We would like to thank our donors for the continued support of the PyPy project. If PyPy is not quite good enough for your needs, we are available for direct consulting work.

We would also like to thank our contributors and encourage new people to join the project. PyPy has many layers and we need help with all of them: PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, or general help with making RPython's JIT even better.

## What is PyPy?

PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter, almost a drop-in replacement for CPython 2.7, 3.6. It's fast (PyPy and CPython 2.7.x performance comparison) due to its integrated tracing JIT compiler.

We also welcome developers of other dynamic languages to see what RPython can do for them.

This PyPy release supports:

> - x86 machines on most common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD)

> - big- and little-endian variants of PPC64 running Linux,

> - s390x running Linux

Unfortunately at the moment of writing our ARM buildbots are out of service, so for now we are not releasing any binary for the ARM architecture, although PyPy does support ARM 32 bit processors.

## Changelog

Changes shared across versions

- Use utf8 internally to represent unicode, with the goal of never using rpython-level unicode

- Update `cffi` to 1.12.2

- Improve performance of `long` operations where one of the operands fits into an `int`

- Since _ctypes is implemented in pure python over libffi, add interfaces and methods to support the buffer interface from python. Specifically, add a `__pypy__.newmemoryview` function to create a memoryview and extend the use of the PyPy-specific `__buffer__` class method. This enables better buffer sharing between ctypes and NumPy.

- Add copying to zlib

- Improve register allocation in the JIT by using better heuristics

- Include `<sys/sysmacros.h>` on Gnu/Hurd

- Mostly for completeness sake: support for `rlib.jit.promote_unicode`, which behaves like `promote_string`, but for rpython unicode objects

- Correctly initialize the `d_type` and `d_name` members of builtin descriptors to fix a segfault related to classmethods in Cython

- Expand documentation of `__pypy_` module

C-API (cpyext) improvements shared across versions

- Move PyTuple_Type.tp_new to C

- Call internal methods from `PyDict_XXXItem()` instead of going through dunder methods (CPython cpyext compatibility)

Python 3.6 only

- Support for os.PathLike in the posix module

- Update `idellib` for 3.6.1

- Make `BUILD_CONST_KEY_MAP` JIT-friendly

- Adapt code that optimizes `sys.exc_info()` to wordcode

- Fix annotation bug found by `attrs`