Sunsetting PyPy support
TL;DR: We are planning to remove PyPy from conda-forge feedstock recipes in a few weeks (and thus to stop building new releases of packages for PyPy), unless there is substantial enough interest to justify the continued maintenance effort.
Conda-forge introduced support for PyPy as an alternative implementation of Python about 4.5 years ago.
In that time we have worked hard together with developers from PyPy to provide easily installable pre-compiled builds of the most common libraries also for PyPy.
As a very positive side-effect, the infrastructure of conda-forge is now fully equipped to deal with alternative implementations of the Python interpreter, which will continue to be useful (for example for supporting the experimental free-threading builds of CPython 3.13).
However, due to a lack of resources – both in terms of expertise for PyPy, as well as available time of those who can help – the conda-forge builds for PyPy packages have been in minimal maintenance for a while (for example, we never migrated for PyPy 3.10, nor did PyPy participate in the NumPy 2.0 migration).
As a consequence, we unfortunately need to announce that we are sunsetting support for PyPy. This means we will stop the long-running migrator to add PyPy to new feedstocks, and we will begin removing PyPy builds from feedstocks at the latest on October 1st, or when we begin migrating for CPython 3.13 (whichever comes earlier).
If you are depending on PyPy builds in some way, please let us know about the specifics of your situation in the discussion issue for the RFC.
There is a possibility that we receive the necessary support from the PyPy developers, if it turns out that enough people depend on PyPy support in conda-forge for it to be worth their time. As such, please speak up if you fall into this category!
Finally, no matter the outcome, we want to congratulate the PyPy developers for their important contributions and exploration of what is possible in the Python ecosystem! 👏
It has been a pleasure to collaborate!