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I agree with your overall characterization. As someone who works a lot with Python and is very familiar with its package ecosystem, I find the lack of leadershi

by ak217 6y ago

I agree with your overall characterization. As someone who works a lot with Python and is very familiar with its package ecosystem, I find the lack of leadership from PSF to be discouraging and upsetting. The past few Python releases have what I would characterize as cosmetic improvements while repeatedly missing opportunities to improve interpreter, packaging, and interface fundamentals. The position that CPython has to be kept simple as a reference implementation is untenable in the absence of an active collaboration or effort to produce a performance oriented implementation. As far as I'm concerned, CPython as an interpreter technology has not advanced in the past decade - and Python has grown thanks to the data science community efforts and excellent library ecosystem you mention, not due to PSF. PSF can only miss so many opportunities before something comprehensively better starts to eclipse it.

willseth 6y ago
I do get the impression that position is not the overwhelming consensus among CPython core devs (nor does it really make sense, given the huge dependency of many packages to the C API), whether or not it is what PSF may have publicly communicated. There are a few glimmers that interpreter improvements are on the horizon, with some proposals like subinterpreters and GIL mitigation getting a lot of attention, all which (to my knowledge) are necessary and prerequisite to serious, bold performance improvements. I agree performance is important, and I think we have reason to be optimistic, but with the understanding that that level of improvement, even if currently underway, will just take a lot of effort and time. Meanwhile, as someone fairly new to Python and working on several performance critical pieces, I've been pretty impressed with what you can do with the current compute packages (after taking months to work my way through most of them).

by ak217 6y ago

willseth 6y ago

I do get the impression that position is not the overwhelming consensus among CPython core devs (nor does it really make sense, given the huge dependency of many packages to the C API), whether or not it is what PSF may have publicly communicated. There are a few glimmers that interpreter improvements are on the horizon, with some proposals like subinterpreters and GIL mitigation getting a lot of attention, all which (to my knowledge) are necessary and prerequisite to serious, bold performance improvements. I agree performance is important, and I think we have reason to be optimistic, but with the understanding that that level of improvement, even if currently underway, will just take a lot of effort and time. Meanwhile, as someone fairly new to Python and working on several performance critical pieces, I've been pretty impressed with what you can do with the current compute packages (after taking months to work my way through most of them).