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Well, there are multiple attempts in Python's history to make it faster, yet failed. Most noteworthy one is Unladen Swallow from Google: https://www.python.or

Well, there are multiple attempts in Python's history to make it faster, yet failed. Most noteworthy one is Unladen Swallow from Google: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/ And Dropbox's now dead Pyston. While both are pretty dynamic, Python has a rich ecosystem of C-extensions, which exposes a lot of interpreter details to developers, making moving away from the CPython implementation much harder or straight impossible if compatibility is required.

bakery2k 8y ago
Unladen Swallow had a small fraction of the resources that Google allocated to V8, though. I think it was only worked on by a few interns. Pyston was better supported, but I think just too ambitious - IIRC it was initially intended to be a full rewrite and to be compatible with C-extensions.
- tanilama 8y ago
  Pyston as far as I was tracking, it seems to be mainly 2 devs from Dropbox, hardly that better off. You have a point though, no company can replace javascript , the cost is straightly forbidden. But Python as mainly a backend language at the time, it can be more realistically replaced, with newer more performant alternatives like Golang, and to some extent node.js. But it has its own stronghold, which is data/ml land stuff. However, that community has gotten around with Python in its own way, either they are tolering the slowness because that happens behind the scene, or they are bypassing the performance bottleneck to c-extensions. So in the end, I guess people love complaining about Python's performance, including myself, but it never reaches the break point where they said enough is enough.
  - cbxxx 8y ago
    The number of devs is not so important. One author who is left alone from corporate BS for three years can achieve more than a collection of 10 randomly hired programmers who just disturb the lead dev.
    - woadwarrior01 8y ago
      As someone who has worked on language runtimes in a corporate environment, I believe there’s some truth to this. One successful example of this would be Mike Pall, of the LuaJIT fame.
llukas 8y ago
PyPy is faring pretty well in terms of performance and compatibility.
- tanilama 8y ago
  Performance maybe, but not without gotchas. However, compatibility is certainly not: http://packages.pypy.org/ http://packages.pypy.org/ Scipy/scikit-learn/pandas/matplotlib/h5py aren't supported, and all the packages depends on them, which makes it not an option for probably the most important segment of python's user base.
  - j88439h84 8y ago
    Those packages work just fine on pypy. They just don't support Python 2.
lazyjones 8y ago
There is https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython too, doesn’t seem to be dead yet.
ZuLuuuuuu 8y ago
Would it help making it more cross-interpreter if new Python extensions who communicate with C code were written using the standard ctypes package instead of C-extensions which depends on CPython implementation? Or even porting the existing extensions? Would this be technically possible?
sametmax 8y ago
The amount of ressource can't be compared. Hundred of millions have been poured at chrome, ie and firefox. The best specialists in the world in the field of interpretters and JIT worked on them. For years. The Python projects were mostly personnal initiatives approved by the companies.

bakery2k 8y ago

Unladen Swallow had a small fraction of the resources that Google allocated to V8, though. I think it was only worked on by a few interns. Pyston was better supported, but I think just too ambitious - IIRC it was initially intended to be a full rewrite and to be compatible with C-extensions.

tanilama 8y ago
Pyston as far as I was tracking, it seems to be mainly 2 devs from Dropbox, hardly that better off. You have a point though, no company can replace javascript , the cost is straightly forbidden. But Python as mainly a backend language at the time, it can be more realistically replaced, with newer more performant alternatives like Golang, and to some extent node.js. But it has its own stronghold, which is data/ml land stuff. However, that community has gotten around with Python in its own way, either they are tolering the slowness because that happens behind the scene, or they are bypassing the performance bottleneck to c-extensions. So in the end, I guess people love complaining about Python's performance, including myself, but it never reaches the break point where they said enough is enough.
- cbxxx 8y ago
  The number of devs is not so important. One author who is left alone from corporate BS for three years can achieve more than a collection of 10 randomly hired programmers who just disturb the lead dev.
  - woadwarrior01 8y ago
    As someone who has worked on language runtimes in a corporate environment, I believe there’s some truth to this. One successful example of this would be Mike Pall, of the LuaJIT fame.

llukas 8y ago

PyPy is faring pretty well in terms of performance and compatibility.

tanilama 8y ago
Performance maybe, but not without gotchas. However, compatibility is certainly not: http://packages.pypy.org/ http://packages.pypy.org/ Scipy/scikit-learn/pandas/matplotlib/h5py aren't supported, and all the packages depends on them, which makes it not an option for probably the most important segment of python's user base.
- j88439h84 8y ago
  Those packages work just fine on pypy. They just don't support Python 2.

lazyjones 8y ago

There is https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython too, doesn’t seem to be dead yet.

ZuLuuuuuu 8y ago

Would it help making it more cross-interpreter if new Python extensions who communicate with C code were written using the standard ctypes package instead of C-extensions which depends on CPython implementation? Or even porting the existing extensions? Would this be technically possible?

sametmax 8y ago

The amount of ressource can't be compared. Hundred of millions have been poured at chrome, ie and firefox. The best specialists in the world in the field of interpretters and JIT worked on them. For years. The Python projects were mostly personnal initiatives approved by the companies.