Compiling PyPy

I've unfortunately been kept from any personal hacking due to house-related errands and to required reading. Tonight I checked out the current PyPy development tree and set it to compiling. I threw caution to the wind and set it going with CPython; two hours later the compile is still running. In the meantime I explored the bug tracker a bit and picked out a few potential tasks to look at: #979, large pickles seem to hang indefinitely; #879 curses not available via ctypes.