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by chrisseaton 2822 days ago
What happened to their new implementation of Python they were building? I know it was cancelled, but not really why.
1 comments

Probably because it was 2.7 only, and only 10% faster on Dropbox's code.

https://blog.pyston.org/2017/01/31/pyston-0-6-1-released-and...

I'm surprised 10% wasn't enough - 10% bottom-line improvement in programming language implementation is normally massive. Twitter is singing from the roof-tops about 10% improvement in Java performance from the new Graal JIT compiler.
I would imagine that for code that is performance sensitive enough that a 10% improvement matters, they would be porting to a language with saner performance instead?
PyPy is already way better than that, and has a Python 3.5 implementation.
I'm by no means an expert on the subject, but isn't there an advantage to having a JIT compiler use LLVM?

On another note, I believe one thing that has been problematic for pypy adoption is that it does not automatically work with C extensions or Cython, and generally if someone already had performance issues with CPython, they would have written some C/Cython extensions?

PyPy is far more than just 'python with a JIT'.

It's a tool that allows you to write an entire interpreter in RPython (a subset of Python) and then have it build a native binary with a free jit compiler included, with the specifics of your language encoded within. The reference implementation for this project is a Python interpreter.

It's seriously, seriously cool.

Maybe because 10% on a server is much more valuable than 10% on a client.

On a server, you’re paying for that 10%. On a client, you’re not. If it was 10% for nearly free then sure - but maintaining a separate implementation of a language is costly.

No, Pyston said of their last version "On Dropbox’s server, we are 10% faster."

PS Thanks for all your Django contributions!

Should have read the article, whoops. Thanks for the correction!