PyPy 7.1 releases with UTF-8 for Unicode strings

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PyPy team released version 7.1 of PyPy, a fast and compliant Python Interpreter, yesterday. PyPy 7.1 explores new features, improvements, and other changes. PyPy 7.1 supports x86 machines on common operating systems (Linux 32/64 bits, Mac OS X 64 bits, Windows 32 bits, OpenBSD, FreeBSD), ARM32, s390x running Linux, etc.

What’s new in PyPy 7.1?

PyPy 7.1 comes with two different interpreters, namely, PyPy2.7 (an interpreter that supports the syntax and features of Python 2.7) and PyPy3.6-beta (second official release of PyPy that supports 3.6 features).
The latest release finally merges the internal refactoring of unicode representation as UTF-8. Users can remove the conversions from strings to unicode internally, thus leading to a nice speed bump.
The UTF-8 changes have been merged to the py3.5 branch (Python3.5.3).
The ability to use the buffer protocol with ctype structures and arrays has been improved in PyPy 7.1.
The CFFI (C Foreign Function Interface) backend has been updated to version 1.12.2 in PyPy 7.1. Users can use CFFI as opposed to the c-extensions to interact with C and cppyy to interact with C++ code.

PyPy team states that they need help from the contributors in case of PyPy and RPython documentation improvements, for tweaking popular modules to run on pypy, and general help with making RPython’s JIT even better.

For more information, check out the official PyPy 7.1 release notes.