Since I am running quite a few python apps on my Pi3 that take up a considerable amount of RAM and CPU, I wondered why Pypy is not available on archlinuxarm.
After reading an old Post https://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=5961&p=33577&hilit=pypy#p33577 and some googling, I figured Pypy has gotten ARM support in the meantime and should now compile. So I tried compiling it using the official PKGBUILD from https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/pypy/
Results:
- failed on my Pi3 because it ran out of memory (just like the Pypy Developers say on their Homepage: 1 GB of RAM is not enough, with or without swap)
- also failed using distcc for the same reason: the memory intensive part is not gcc but python and not distributed by distcc
- successfully compiled in a cross-compile environment with some minor tweaks: making a few symlinks so the compile process would find the libraries. Probably caused by this "standalone cross compile without an ARM master" not being a very clean setup. Of course the binary then did not run because of some linker errors. (as said before: I am aware this was a bad idea, since this setup is not supported)
At this point I'm ready to give up, unless someone has an ARM device with more than 1 GB of RAM and want's to give this a try?