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Does anyone have a good understanding of why PyPy did not supplant CPython? I'm not familiar with it, but from reading their website, they claim it's better at

by m0zg 7y ago

Does anyone have a good understanding of why PyPy did not supplant CPython? I'm not familiar with it, but from reading their website, they claim it's better at pretty much everything. So the question naturally arises, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?

j88439h84 7y ago
Good question. One reason is PyPy didn't support NumPy until last year.
SaxonRobber 7y ago
Because CPython is the reference implementation.
dragonsh 7y ago
Main reason is for majority of the workloads it didn’t improve performance significantly. In some cases cpython was much faster. Didn’t offer much incentive to move to pypy JIT from cpython JIT.
- dagenix 7y ago
  CPython implements a simple bytecode interpreter. It does not have a JIT.
thisgoodlife 7y ago
too many libraries don't work with pypy. The last time I checked, psycopg2 doesn't work. Completely a deal breaker for me.
- feydaykyn 7y ago
  There's psycopg-cffi which does the job
- Pinus 7y ago
  Just out of idle curiosity: Why don't they work?
  - zielmicha 7y ago
    PyPy doesn't completely implement Python C API (which anyway is specified only by the CPython implementation, not in any formal manner).
jdc 7y ago
Lagging Python 3 implementation early on didn't help. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11541744