[glofish]

wait - what?

Is Django a big enough project for you?

Did you know that Django was not only successfully migrated from Python 2 to Python 3, it was ported in such a way that for many years it used the same codebase in both languages ...

Perhaps that's the biggest advantage of porting from 2 to 3. A lot of the code could run in both languages.

[seriesf]

The corollary of my complaint is there will always be someone who pops up on HN with no idea how many lines of code are in a "large project" like Dropbox or YouTube.

[glofish]

This is kind of a cop-out, how would anyone know?

Is Dropbox open source? Is Dropbox even a typical Python application representative of the challenges of porting from 2 to 3?

My hunch is that the challenges of porting Dropbox to any other language have to do less with Python more with the need to deal with a filesystem at a lower and more granular level than what typical programming languages offer. Thus everything needs to be rewritten in bazillions of ways to handle the bazillion corner cases.