Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by masklinn 4376 days ago
> I wish the community would just switch entirely to pypy.

What purpose would that serve?

> Being able to just slightly performance sensitive code in python is a huge win.

I think you slightly this phrase, but aside from that pypy does not work for everybody and everything (e.g. at best it's no slower for sphinx, it really doesn't like the way docutils works). It's not like pypy's a magic wand.

1 comments

> What purpose would that serve?

If PyPy became the official/canonical implementation, PyPy would receive more attention and third-party library compatibility would be a requirement. Complaints about Python's slowness would be somewhat less relevant, and Python might see wider adoption. The RPython toolchain would receive more attention and that could be useful to other languages. There are plenty of reasons, but PyPy is usually a free speedup for your Python application. Who's going to complain about that?

> pypy does not work for everybody and everything

True, but as the official implementation of Python, compatibility with PyPy would then be a must, and this situation would be greatly improved.

I agree with you, but it will never happen. GvR wants a as-simple-as-possible reference implementation, for one, he has to maintain it with a volunteer dev team. Also, there's a split in the Python community between guys like me and you- and the scientific squad. Until the scientific stuff works 100% in PyPy you'd lose a significant portion of the Python userbase by dumping CPython.

GvR has done enough damage to Python with Python3. I don't intend to encourage him to do make any more changes. Us Python web developers are better off using what we have (non reference implementations, which don't hurt anyone), or just use Node.js.

I don't think it's fair to put the blame of the unfortunate way things have gone with Python 3 solely on the shoulders of GvR. Afaik, a huge part of the community felt this was the way to go. Unfortunely, it wasn't.
Killing Python 3 isn't something a majority of the community wants and it isn't objectively better either.
I agree entirely. What's kind of a pity is that until NumPy is ported over, all of the scientific stack is basically unusable on PyPy - and right now, there are several incredibly good NumPy specific JITs (numexpr, numba, parakeet).