30 ms·

Python JIT project was asked to pause development

182 points by kbumsik 3mo ago

sitkack 3mo ago
I have used Python as my main language since the late 90s and it has been over the last decade and half been getting more unserious. It would be nice if cpython opened up a bit, pluggable GC and JIT would go along way towards reducing this manufactured drama. It wasn't cool to see PyPy or Stackless getting sidelined.
- woodruffw 3mo ago
  This isn't really a substantive comment, and to at least one extent it's trivially falsifiable (15 years is before Python 3 became usable, so that alone is a "serious" change in the language). > pluggable GC and JIT would go along way One of the points mentioned in the linked discussion is explicitly about ensuring that the JIT design enables multiple implementations.
  - sitkack 3mo ago
    Python 2 to 3 transition was also unserious. The flippant attitude of cpythons wrt the standard library is also unfortunate. Please with your substantive comment comment.
    - woodruffw 3mo ago
      It seems to have been serious enough; I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3. > Please with your substantive comment comment. I think binning things as drama isn't substantive, particularly when noting about the linked conversation seems dramatic. I also think they're actually talking about the thing you want (pluggable JIT), so the objection seems incongruous.
      - anticorporate 3mo ago
        > I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3. I assumed Python 2 was pretty much ubiquitous and that the world wasn't adopting Python 3 very quickly for a long time, but I do wonder if the applications I was working with a decade and a half ago (ArcGIS, Blender, Civ4, lots of Red Hat system tools, etc.) biased that viewpoint.
      - cdavid 3mo ago
        That's debatable. We can't go back in history, but if it were not for ML/data science, I believe python 3 would have killed python. At that time web dev / CLI utilities were major use cases, and that was the time golang became mainstream. Data science, and then ofc DL being done through python just when python 3 was kinda usable (around 3.3/3.4) was a struck of luck timing-wise.
IshKebab 3mo ago
Seems reasonable. As I understand it the JIT implementation has not really been successful anyway.
Qem 3mo ago
> For that reason, the Steering Council is formally requesting a Standards Track PEP be authored that the community can discuss and the Steering Council can formally accept (or reject), making the case for the JIT as a supported, non-experimental part of CPython: its guarantees, its maintenance commitments, and its impact on redistributors. I didn't notice the current PEP was a provisional one. Hope the new one gets approved. The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. [1] https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html
- ksec 3mo ago
  >The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. Thank You. As someone who don't follow python closely I thought their JIT would be similar to what Ruby has. Not that Ruby YJIT or ZJIT is anywhere close to what JVM provides, but in this case it seems to be quite far ahead of Python. Which is surprising given how many major companies are using Python. May be because those using Python are not using it as critical part of work unlike Shopify and Stripe which is their core language?
  - bob001 3mo ago
    Python software is to a large extent either doing things in not-python (c, c++, rust, etc.) or doing things that are not cpu bound (io bound, async, etc.). If you're cpu bound then you can either take a 2x jit improvement or take a 10x non-python improvement. There's few companies of a scale where the non-hot path cost of 2x cpu is so massive as to be worth caring about.
    - jbvlkt 3mo ago
      Also you can use projects like numba https://numba.pydata.org/ https://numba.pydata.org/
    - thatguysaguy 3mo ago
      The python overhead of launching big ML jobs is nontrivial, so I think speeding that up would be meaningful. (I mean the initial tracing and other setup, not things once the GPUs are actually doing the work).
nmstoker 3mo ago
Duplicate of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400
- elpocko 3mo ago
  Don't bother clicking, that post got 0 attention. Not helpful, mate.
  - nmstoker 3mo ago
    It is literally the same link, it was the original and it had the correct title rather than the editorialised one here. At the time I posted it, both were pretty lacking in attention, so it made sense to direct to the earlier of the two.
    - elpocko 3mo ago
      It would make sense if there was any activity on that older post. A 12 hour old post with no comments is dead, linking to it is a waste of time, especially for those who click on it to find 0 comments. I did click on your link, it was a waste of time and that wasn't very nice.
OutOfHere 3mo ago
Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.
- bob001 3mo ago
  Python isn't a side project to yolo on. Updating the GC without a PEP caused massive issues for actual people using Python. If you want to impact software used by millions of developers then you better be willing to handle a bit of process.
  - rurban 3mo ago
    Killing the incremental GC for synthetic benchmarks, not real ones, caused the issues. If the processes are broken and you get nothing done with it, you better step aside and do it without. Fork it, and drive the blockers away.
- kzrdude 3mo ago
  The JIT project already lost a lot of momentum when the people working on it lost their jobs (at Microsoft)..
- simonw 3mo ago
  They're not being asked to halt development, they're being asked to halt landing new features on the cPython main branch.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- 12_throw_away 3mo ago
  What does "beancounting" mean here? I don't see anything about money or budgets in the announcement. Are you referring to their concerns about the maintainability and complexity of the codebase?
jhayward 3mo ago
> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. If I were a contributor I would read such language as saying "we have no respect for you or your intelligence, so we'll just straight up gaslight you and expect you to accept it." The dictum can't be read literally - it has to be read like the manipulative, narcissist-speak that it is. And what it's telling you is - get out.
- KaiserPro 3mo ago
  > The dictum can't be read literally out of curiosity, why not? I mean it seems like they want to get a full spec of what JIT should look like in main? given the faff that hapened with the GC removal, I can sort see why they'd want to do this properly. Especially now that it seems like its practical.
- _old_dude_ 3mo ago
  I agree. And the next section is very clear that they want to kill the project. > For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, > it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that > can support multiple implementation strategies. > Since many different and promising JIT tracing approaches continue to be proposed, > we believe the infrastructure should make it easy to experiment with and evaluate > those approaches within CPython rather than be highly coupled with a single strategy. Allowing multiple strategies is far harder and as far as I know, JIT tracing is still unproven.
  - zem 3mo ago
    I'm a big fan of the pluggable jit strategy (I even gave a brief presentation about it at an earlier pycon). the idea is that you identify the seams in the interpreter where the jit interacts with the main interpreter loop, and then provide a clean mechanism for the built-in jit to be replaced by something else that works with the same api surface. it's a bit harder than letting the built-in jit be tightly coupled to and intertwined with the rest of the interpreter but certainly not far harder, and the work to get this sort of clean separation will help keep the jit maintainable even if there is never a second jit.
andrewmcwatters 3mo ago
[dead]
kelvinjps10 3mo ago
What a shame it will receive a halt when they where starting to make progress I know that after submitting the pep it will go back to development. But t would have been better to just keep the development and the pep for an actual release or continue and if gets rejected ask them to stop
- Qem 3mo ago
  > What a shame it will receive a halt when they where starting to make progress I know that after submitting the pep it will go back to development. To be fair, the apparent lack of progress of the JIT before was in part due to the same team improving the base interpreter by 40-50% between 3.10 and 3.14. The JIT implementation was pursuing a moving target. It was not some static milestone. Kudos for them.
12398761 3mo ago
That was kind of overdue. The project started five years ago while massively overpromising. They should perhaps have kept it in a separate branch back then, but now is the next best time. CPython's selling point was that it is simple, fast enough with C extensions and the code was accessible. Complicating the code base for occasional 50% speedups (and regressions ...) just isn't worth it. There are so many other languages that fill that need. Now, I hope that the PEP does not overpromise again and is accepted because of Instagram pressure. Instagram can keep its own JIT fork or switch to PHP, Go or whatever.
- ameliaquining 3mo ago
  This hasn't been true for a very long time. Python's major selling points these days are the accessibility of the language and the extensive ecosystem. A vanishingly small fraction of users ever look at the implementation internals. Telling people "if you don't like it, switch to a different language" is particularly unhelpful because rewrites are rather famously expensive. Making things more complicated for the few maintainers, so that they work better for the millions of users, is easily a worthwhile tradeoff.
  - ptx 3mo ago
    Who is going to pay for maintaining the massively more complicated implementation though? Microsoft pulled their funding of the Python team, and even if they hadn't I think there's a danger in making Python so complicated that it can no longer be maintained without the backing of some giant corporation.
simonw 3mo ago
"Asked to pause development" isn't entirely accurate: they were asked to pause landing new features (as opposed to bug fixes) on the cPython main branch.
- mindcrime 3mo ago
  ... and only until the whole thing can be fully formalized with an approved PEP. I'm no Python insider, but that doesn't sound horribly controversial to me. And yet, I have a hunch it will piss off a lot of people nonetheless and lead to much outrage and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hopefully it all works out in the long run.
mwkaufma 3mo ago
>> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. lol >> For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies. poison-pill requirement >> We are setting a window of six months for a PEP to be submitted and resolved. If no such PEP is accepted within that window, the JIT code must be removed from the main branch so it's going to be removed from the main branch
- scott_w 3mo ago
  No, it’s a simple request to fully investigate the options before committing a massive piece of work to Python. We’ve seen bad implementations of things land before and now live forever. And frankly, if the team can’t pull together a strong maintenance plan, it can’t be allowed to remain in main.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    So it will join PyPy and GraalPy in the corner. Python JIT history is full of drama, and no, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Interlisp-D, SELF are just as dynamic if not more.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 3mo ago
      And Ruby
      - petre 3mo ago
        Ruby has not one, two, but three JITs.
        pjmlp 3mo ago
        Actually more, are you country JRuby, TruffleRuby and RubyMotion.
oefrha 3mo ago
Sounds reasonable given the recent YOLO GC debacle https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in-python-3-14-and-3-15/107014 https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in....
- wavemode 3mo ago
  That seems entirely unrelated?
  - Retr0id 3mo ago
    It's related in the sense that it's an example of something that didn't go through the formal PEP process
questiuner 3mo ago
Why was PyPy abandoned and not embraced by Python? NIH?
- kzrdude 3mo ago
  The short answer is that CPython didn't want to break compatibility with lots and lots and lots of Python modules implemented in C, so it was never viable to let PyPy seamlessly replace CPython.
- JulianWasTaken 3mo ago
  (PyPy was not abandoned.) I assume you might mean to ask "why wasn't PyPy adopted in some formal way into CPython" rather than a separate project, for which the answer is at least partially likely to be because it's a completely separate implementation.
mellosouls 3mo ago
Editorialised title. Development hasn't been paused (with negative implications). It's now considered significant enough that they've requested feature freeze in CPython main until governance/process questions are settled.
- wavemode 3mo ago
  It's effectively a pause. In a project the size of CPython, and a subproject the complexity of a JIT, you can't continue work on a separate branch/repo without guaranteeing that there will be a massive amount of (both textual and semantic) merge conflicts down the road.
  - baq 3mo ago
    Nah, you just merge main back every day or so.
    - folkrav 3mo ago
      That works, until that inevitable one merge that's harder to fix and takes longer, which in my experience then tends to snowball until it's basically the very merge hell you were trying to avoid. Can't say I've ever had a great experience with long lived feature branches. I can't imagine what it would even look like trying to do this on such a massive project and such an overarching feature.
  - necovek 3mo ago
    But with a project running for as long as they are, is it not already clear what they are going for? Is the architecture not settled? If it is, is it not documented somewhere? Maybe as a formal PEP? If it is not and it is still in heavy experimentation phase (which is fine), it should not be part of the mainline CPython no matter how much more effort it is for the team to experiment with.
Fraterkes 3mo ago
People in this thread writing conspiracy theories over the biggest language in the world requiring a bit of bureaucracy lends some credence to the idea that programming is not real engineering.
- knollimar 3mo ago
  Is TS bigger?
- 12_throw_away 3mo ago
  Right? Every popular language has lots of real problems. Every language has made decisions that people don't like. Every language has varying degrees of imperfect governance. Weirdly enough, most languages even seem to grow at least a small community of dedicated conspiracy theorists. But for whatever reason, it's particularly hard to find level-headed discussions about Python, moreso than js or rust or C++. It's weird.
dist-epoch 3mo ago
There is a large graveyard of JITs and JIT-adjacent projects for Python. By now it should be clear to anybody working on Python JIT that the probability of failure is 90%. The future is probably rewriting performance critical Python code in Rust instead of trying to fix Python. Or maybe a future LLM could add a JIT to Python in an effort-run.
- adsharma 3mo ago
  The future is to write Rust in a python interpreter compatible way leveraging large parts of the python ecosystem. This will require minor tweaks to the language and perhaps a forked interpreter (a forked parser already exists). Then you solve the two language problem with a combination of probabilistic and deterministic translation.
ospider 3mo ago
This is really a sad moment, I hope the free-theading feature can be kept in the main line. For me, running my library in real threads has actuall revealed some hidden fatal bugs which are hard to reproduce with the GIL> As for performance, Python 3.x was not even as fast as Python 2.x in the beginning, but with the correct mindset, it's eventually faster.
germandiago 3mo ago
I am not sure if this is even possible since I have no experience implementing JITs, but maybe it would be a good idea to make it pluggable so that it does not unstabilize other parts of the interpreter in a way that it can continue development?
varispeed 3mo ago
Death by committee. I hope they are proud of themselves. JIT should be a top priority given popularity of Python. It should significantly reduce carbon footprint of Python driven applications.
anon-3988 3mo ago
Why is Python trying to be fast? Can it please stop messing around with the bytecode to make it "faster". If your user want speed, please for the love of god just use anything else. Just keep Python simple and immortal. I want to keep using Python as is for the next 50 years, please stop breaking shit because you want to fit a square into a rectangular hole.

182 points by kbumsik 3mo ago

I have used Python as my main language since the late 90s and it has been over the last decade and half been getting more unserious. It would be nice if cpython opened up a bit, pluggable GC and JIT would go along way towards reducing this manufactured drama. It wasn't cool to see PyPy or Stackless getting sidelined.

woodruffw 3mo ago
This isn't really a substantive comment, and to at least one extent it's trivially falsifiable (15 years is before Python 3 became usable, so that alone is a "serious" change in the language). > pluggable GC and JIT would go along way One of the points mentioned in the linked discussion is explicitly about ensuring that the JIT design enables multiple implementations.
- sitkack 3mo ago
  Python 2 to 3 transition was also unserious. The flippant attitude of cpythons wrt the standard library is also unfortunate. Please with your substantive comment comment.
  - woodruffw 3mo ago
    It seems to have been serious enough; I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3. > Please with your substantive comment comment. I think binning things as drama isn't substantive, particularly when noting about the linked conversation seems dramatic. I also think they're actually talking about the thing you want (pluggable JIT), so the objection seems incongruous.
    - anticorporate 3mo ago
      > I don't think Python would have succeeded as a language if they hadn't done Python 3. I assumed Python 2 was pretty much ubiquitous and that the world wasn't adopting Python 3 very quickly for a long time, but I do wonder if the applications I was working with a decade and a half ago (ArcGIS, Blender, Civ4, lots of Red Hat system tools, etc.) biased that viewpoint.
    - cdavid 3mo ago
      That's debatable. We can't go back in history, but if it were not for ML/data science, I believe python 3 would have killed python. At that time web dev / CLI utilities were major use cases, and that was the time golang became mainstream. Data science, and then ofc DL being done through python just when python 3 was kinda usable (around 3.3/3.4) was a struck of luck timing-wise.

IshKebab 3mo ago

Seems reasonable. As I understand it the JIT implementation has not really been successful anyway.

Qem 3mo ago

> For that reason, the Steering Council is formally requesting a Standards Track PEP be authored that the community can discuss and the Steering Council can formally accept (or reject), making the case for the JIT as a supported, non-experimental part of CPython: its guarantees, its maintenance commitments, and its impact on redistributors. I didn't notice the current PEP was a provisional one. Hope the new one gets approved. The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. [1] https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html

ksec 3mo ago
>The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. Thank You. As someone who don't follow python closely I thought their JIT would be similar to what Ruby has. Not that Ruby YJIT or ZJIT is anywhere close to what JVM provides, but in this case it seems to be quite far ahead of Python. Which is surprising given how many major companies are using Python. May be because those using Python are not using it as critical part of work unlike Shopify and Stripe which is their core language?
- bob001 3mo ago
  Python software is to a large extent either doing things in not-python (c, c++, rust, etc.) or doing things that are not cpu bound (io bound, async, etc.). If you're cpu bound then you can either take a 2x jit improvement or take a 10x non-python improvement. There's few companies of a scale where the non-hot path cost of 2x cpu is so massive as to be worth caring about.
  - jbvlkt 3mo ago
    Also you can use projects like numba https://numba.pydata.org/ https://numba.pydata.org/
  - thatguysaguy 3mo ago
    The python overhead of launching big ML jobs is nontrivial, so I think speeding that up would be meaningful. (I mean the initial tracing and other setup, not things once the GPUs are actually doing the work).

nmstoker 3mo ago

Duplicate of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400

elpocko 3mo ago
Don't bother clicking, that post got 0 attention. Not helpful, mate.
- nmstoker 3mo ago
  It is literally the same link, it was the original and it had the correct title rather than the editorialised one here. At the time I posted it, both were pretty lacking in attention, so it made sense to direct to the earlier of the two.
  - elpocko 3mo ago
    It would make sense if there was any activity on that older post. A 12 hour old post with no comments is dead, linking to it is a waste of time, especially for those who click on it to find 0 comments. I did click on your link, it was a waste of time and that wasn't very nice.

OutOfHere 3mo ago

Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.

bob001 3mo ago
Python isn't a side project to yolo on. Updating the GC without a PEP caused massive issues for actual people using Python. If you want to impact software used by millions of developers then you better be willing to handle a bit of process.
- rurban 3mo ago
  Killing the incremental GC for synthetic benchmarks, not real ones, caused the issues. If the processes are broken and you get nothing done with it, you better step aside and do it without. Fork it, and drive the blockers away.
kzrdude 3mo ago
The JIT project already lost a lot of momentum when the people working on it lost their jobs (at Microsoft)..
simonw 3mo ago
They're not being asked to halt development, they're being asked to halt landing new features on the cPython main branch.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
12_throw_away 3mo ago
What does "beancounting" mean here? I don't see anything about money or budgets in the announcement. Are you referring to their concerns about the maintainability and complexity of the codebase?

jhayward 3mo ago

> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. If I were a contributor I would read such language as saying "we have no respect for you or your intelligence, so we'll just straight up gaslight you and expect you to accept it." The dictum can't be read literally - it has to be read like the manipulative, narcissist-speak that it is. And what it's telling you is - get out.

KaiserPro 3mo ago
> The dictum can't be read literally out of curiosity, why not? I mean it seems like they want to get a full spec of what JIT should look like in main? given the faff that hapened with the GC removal, I can sort see why they'd want to do this properly. Especially now that it seems like its practical.
_old_dude_ 3mo ago
I agree. And the next section is very clear that they want to kill the project. > For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, > it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that > can support multiple implementation strategies. > Since many different and promising JIT tracing approaches continue to be proposed, > we believe the infrastructure should make it easy to experiment with and evaluate > those approaches within CPython rather than be highly coupled with a single strategy. Allowing multiple strategies is far harder and as far as I know, JIT tracing is still unproven.
- zem 3mo ago
  I'm a big fan of the pluggable jit strategy (I even gave a brief presentation about it at an earlier pycon). the idea is that you identify the seams in the interpreter where the jit interacts with the main interpreter loop, and then provide a clean mechanism for the built-in jit to be replaced by something else that works with the same api surface. it's a bit harder than letting the built-in jit be tightly coupled to and intertwined with the rest of the interpreter but certainly not far harder, and the work to get this sort of clean separation will help keep the jit maintainable even if there is never a second jit.

andrewmcwatters 3mo ago

[dead]

kelvinjps10 3mo ago

What a shame it will receive a halt when they where starting to make progress I know that after submitting the pep it will go back to development. But t would have been better to just keep the development and the pep for an actual release or continue and if gets rejected ask them to stop

Qem 3mo ago
> What a shame it will receive a halt when they where starting to make progress I know that after submitting the pep it will go back to development. To be fair, the apparent lack of progress of the JIT before was in part due to the same team improving the base interpreter by 40-50% between 3.10 and 3.14. The JIT implementation was pursuing a moving target. It was not some static milestone. Kudos for them.

12398761 3mo ago

That was kind of overdue. The project started five years ago while massively overpromising. They should perhaps have kept it in a separate branch back then, but now is the next best time. CPython's selling point was that it is simple, fast enough with C extensions and the code was accessible. Complicating the code base for occasional 50% speedups (and regressions ...) just isn't worth it. There are so many other languages that fill that need. Now, I hope that the PEP does not overpromise again and is accepted because of Instagram pressure. Instagram can keep its own JIT fork or switch to PHP, Go or whatever.

ameliaquining 3mo ago
This hasn't been true for a very long time. Python's major selling points these days are the accessibility of the language and the extensive ecosystem. A vanishingly small fraction of users ever look at the implementation internals. Telling people "if you don't like it, switch to a different language" is particularly unhelpful because rewrites are rather famously expensive. Making things more complicated for the few maintainers, so that they work better for the millions of users, is easily a worthwhile tradeoff.
- ptx 3mo ago
  Who is going to pay for maintaining the massively more complicated implementation though? Microsoft pulled their funding of the Python team, and even if they hadn't I think there's a danger in making Python so complicated that it can no longer be maintained without the backing of some giant corporation.

simonw 3mo ago

"Asked to pause development" isn't entirely accurate: they were asked to pause landing new features (as opposed to bug fixes) on the cPython main branch.

mindcrime 3mo ago
... and only until the whole thing can be fully formalized with an approved PEP. I'm no Python insider, but that doesn't sound horribly controversial to me. And yet, I have a hunch it will piss off a lot of people nonetheless and lead to much outrage and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hopefully it all works out in the long run.

mwkaufma 3mo ago

>> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. lol >> For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies. poison-pill requirement >> We are setting a window of six months for a PEP to be submitted and resolved. If no such PEP is accepted within that window, the JIT code must be removed from the main branch so it's going to be removed from the main branch

scott_w 3mo ago
No, it’s a simple request to fully investigate the options before committing a massive piece of work to Python. We’ve seen bad implementations of things land before and now live forever. And frankly, if the team can’t pull together a strong maintenance plan, it can’t be allowed to remain in main.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  So it will join PyPy and GraalPy in the corner. Python JIT history is full of drama, and no, Smalltalk, Common Lisp, Interlisp-D, SELF are just as dynamic if not more.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3mo ago
    And Ruby
    - petre 3mo ago
      Ruby has not one, two, but three JITs.
      - pjmlp 3mo ago
        Actually more, are you country JRuby, TruffleRuby and RubyMotion.

oefrha 3mo ago

Sounds reasonable given the recent YOLO GC debacle https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in-python-3-14-and-3-15/107014 https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in....

wavemode 3mo ago
That seems entirely unrelated?
- Retr0id 3mo ago
  It's related in the sense that it's an example of something that didn't go through the formal PEP process

questiuner 3mo ago

Why was PyPy abandoned and not embraced by Python? NIH?

kzrdude 3mo ago
The short answer is that CPython didn't want to break compatibility with lots and lots and lots of Python modules implemented in C, so it was never viable to let PyPy seamlessly replace CPython.
JulianWasTaken 3mo ago
(PyPy was not abandoned.) I assume you might mean to ask "why wasn't PyPy adopted in some formal way into CPython" rather than a separate project, for which the answer is at least partially likely to be because it's a completely separate implementation.

mellosouls 3mo ago

Editorialised title. Development hasn't been paused (with negative implications). It's now considered significant enough that they've requested feature freeze in CPython main until governance/process questions are settled.

wavemode 3mo ago
It's effectively a pause. In a project the size of CPython, and a subproject the complexity of a JIT, you can't continue work on a separate branch/repo without guaranteeing that there will be a massive amount of (both textual and semantic) merge conflicts down the road.
- baq 3mo ago
  Nah, you just merge main back every day or so.
  - folkrav 3mo ago
    That works, until that inevitable one merge that's harder to fix and takes longer, which in my experience then tends to snowball until it's basically the very merge hell you were trying to avoid. Can't say I've ever had a great experience with long lived feature branches. I can't imagine what it would even look like trying to do this on such a massive project and such an overarching feature.
- necovek 3mo ago
  But with a project running for as long as they are, is it not already clear what they are going for? Is the architecture not settled? If it is, is it not documented somewhere? Maybe as a formal PEP? If it is not and it is still in heavy experimentation phase (which is fine), it should not be part of the mainline CPython no matter how much more effort it is for the team to experiment with.

Fraterkes 3mo ago

People in this thread writing conspiracy theories over the biggest language in the world requiring a bit of bureaucracy lends some credence to the idea that programming is not real engineering.

knollimar 3mo ago
Is TS bigger?
12_throw_away 3mo ago
Right? Every popular language has lots of real problems. Every language has made decisions that people don't like. Every language has varying degrees of imperfect governance. Weirdly enough, most languages even seem to grow at least a small community of dedicated conspiracy theorists. But for whatever reason, it's particularly hard to find level-headed discussions about Python, moreso than js or rust or C++. It's weird.

dist-epoch 3mo ago

There is a large graveyard of JITs and JIT-adjacent projects for Python. By now it should be clear to anybody working on Python JIT that the probability of failure is 90%. The future is probably rewriting performance critical Python code in Rust instead of trying to fix Python. Or maybe a future LLM could add a JIT to Python in an effort-run.

adsharma 3mo ago
The future is to write Rust in a python interpreter compatible way leveraging large parts of the python ecosystem. This will require minor tweaks to the language and perhaps a forked interpreter (a forked parser already exists). Then you solve the two language problem with a combination of probabilistic and deterministic translation.

ospider 3mo ago

This is really a sad moment, I hope the free-theading feature can be kept in the main line. For me, running my library in real threads has actuall revealed some hidden fatal bugs which are hard to reproduce with the GIL> As for performance, Python 3.x was not even as fast as Python 2.x in the beginning, but with the correct mindset, it's eventually faster.

germandiago 3mo ago

I am not sure if this is even possible since I have no experience implementing JITs, but maybe it would be a good idea to make it pluggable so that it does not unstabilize other parts of the interpreter in a way that it can continue development?

varispeed 3mo ago

Death by committee. I hope they are proud of themselves. JIT should be a top priority given popularity of Python. It should significantly reduce carbon footprint of Python driven applications.

anon-3988 3mo ago

Why is Python trying to be fast? Can it please stop messing around with the bytecode to make it "faster". If your user want speed, please for the love of god just use anything else. Just keep Python simple and immortal. I want to keep using Python as is for the next 50 years, please stop breaking shit because you want to fit a square into a rectangular hole.