[kbd]

I really wish Google would support PyPy. It'd be such a small amount of money for them to fund development. Given the PyPy team's demonstrable success and Google's otherwise strong commitment to Python I can't understand why they don't.

[sho_hn]

That Unladden Swallow seems to have died a quiet death in the end sure doesn't support the idea that Google is easy to truely commit to such efforts, though.

[bdr]

My impression is that's because it was a failure technically, not because Google didn't support its goals.

[sho_hn]

I thought the story was that the Unladden Swallow team had actually started expanding into new directions after walking away from LLVM disappointed, but the project then got cancelled from higher-up?

I guess my point, in keeping with the parent, is that you'd expect Google to be interested in sustaining a team looking into performance improvements in an important part of their runtime longer-term, but that didn't happen.

Edit: On an unrelated note, it's good fun to take a look at http://speed.pypy.org/ and consider how close the averaged 4.5x speedup of PyPy trunk over CPython is to the original "make it five times faster" goal of Unladden Swallow.

[archangel_one]

There's a retrospective here which addresses quite a lot of it: http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...

Partly it sounds like performance-critical code at Google tends to get written in a lower level language instead, so Python performance isn't as critical, even though they use it quite a bit.

Agree that it'd be great if they helped out the PyPy team though, since it's showing such great promise and has some pretty impressive numbers already.

[codexon]

They are invested in Go and Dart.