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It is really bad news for Python that Dropbox is mostly done with them. (Announcement says most new code is in Go, so further Pyston development couldn't be ju
by mhneu 10y ago
It is really bad news for Python that Dropbox is mostly done with them. (Announcement says most new code is in Go, so further Pyston development couldn't be justified).
PyPy is not feasible for most workloads. Pyston was making incremental improvements and their developers demonstrated deep knowledge about both Python and JITs (see their blog, "Why is Python slow"). Accelerating numpy is not important, and rewriting it in Python is not useful because the key numerics will never be as fast as Atlas. Only the Pyston approach of JITting the C runtime is likely to work in the wild. And Dropbox just gave up on it.
Unless another company like Facebook funds these two guys or another JIT/VM expert to do full-time work on Pyston, I believe Python's future as a competitor to Go and JS is dead.
- z1mm32m4n 10y agoIs that a bad thing? People used Python even when it was slow and there were faster alternatives. People will still use it going forward.
- seanp2k2 10y agoYeah...for a lot of scripts I've written in Python, it doesn't make a lick of difference if they run in 1 second or 10 minutes. They're glue-type things holding some internal systems together which run in response to events or on crontabs, using widely-used battle-tested libraries, and there clearly-written + decently documented. If someone needs to mess with them some day, they shouldn't have much trouble. As much as I would personally rather write ruby or bash over python (key error will be on my tombstone), for AWS automation stuff, load CSV, mess with it, stuff it into a DB stuff, simple REST APIs, and countless other small-ish automations, Python works just fine at the current speed.