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FT readme : > Cinder is not polished or documented for anyone else's use. We don't have the capacity to support Cinder as an independent open-source project I

by wiz21c 6y ago

FT readme : > Cinder is not polished or documented for anyone else's use. We don't have the capacity to support Cinder as an independent open-source project I'm quite surprised by that. I understand that FB makes tons of money so I can't believe they can't have the capacity... Maybe they don't have the will (which I perfectly understand, it's just the wording) Anyway, it's great they share.

kingmaker 6y ago
> We don't have the capacity to support Cinder as an independent open-source project Our team is smaller than you might think! You also left off the last half of that sentence, which is quite important: "nor any desire for it to become an alternative to CPython." We'd love to see the ideas and implementations in Cinder end up in upstream CPython in some form or another. It'll make our lives easier in that we won't have to maintain as much forked code, and hopefully everyone else will benefit from a faster CPython.
- wiz21c 6y ago
  > Our team is smaller than you might think! I thought so but the other half of my brain was screaming for "FB has so much power, how come they don't invest more in open source". But well, that's economics at play I guess. I'm an idealist after all... Thx for replying !
nly 6y ago
Instagram were heavily using Python (and Django) when acquired by Facebook, whereas Facebook proper were a PHP shop. The most interesting aspect really is that both companies have run in to the limits of performance with dynamically typed languages and had to implement their own language runtimes, AOT compilers, and JIT's. Static typing is the best way forward at scale.
- aeyes 6y ago
  Do we have proof that they had performance problems? At least in Python you can write a C extension for a problematic code path which would probably take much less time. I think what they are looking for is to reduce the amount of machines they need. Which in the end is more money in their pockets. Making the website faster for the end user is a welcome side effect.
  - zerkten 5y ago
    There are articles like https://instagram-engineering.com/dismissing-python-garbage-collection-at-instagram-4dca40b29172 https://instagram-engineering.com/dismissing-python-garbage-... which seem to confirm some problems. One of the people involved with this Cinder project was an original author of https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion (it's now being revamped by a new dev.) Dino had deep .NET/CLR implementation experience and had been the lead for IronPython which I think spawned the interest in perf improvements through Cinder. I hope this effort is more successful for him.
KaiserPro 6y ago
> Maybe they don't have the will nothing is documented in facebook. There are no advantages to doing documentation in your career.
scrollaway 6y ago
Same, i think it's pretty awesome they're sharing something like this without feeling the obligation to make it a "proper" project.

by wiz21c 6y ago

kingmaker 6y ago

> We don't have the capacity to support Cinder as an independent open-source project Our team is smaller than you might think! You also left off the last half of that sentence, which is quite important: "nor any desire for it to become an alternative to CPython." We'd love to see the ideas and implementations in Cinder end up in upstream CPython in some form or another. It'll make our lives easier in that we won't have to maintain as much forked code, and hopefully everyone else will benefit from a faster CPython.

wiz21c 6y ago
> Our team is smaller than you might think! I thought so but the other half of my brain was screaming for "FB has so much power, how come they don't invest more in open source". But well, that's economics at play I guess. I'm an idealist after all... Thx for replying !

nly 6y ago

Instagram were heavily using Python (and Django) when acquired by Facebook, whereas Facebook proper were a PHP shop. The most interesting aspect really is that both companies have run in to the limits of performance with dynamically typed languages and had to implement their own language runtimes, AOT compilers, and JIT's. Static typing is the best way forward at scale.

aeyes 6y ago
Do we have proof that they had performance problems? At least in Python you can write a C extension for a problematic code path which would probably take much less time. I think what they are looking for is to reduce the amount of machines they need. Which in the end is more money in their pockets. Making the website faster for the end user is a welcome side effect.
- zerkten 5y ago
  There are articles like https://instagram-engineering.com/dismissing-python-garbage-collection-at-instagram-4dca40b29172 https://instagram-engineering.com/dismissing-python-garbage-... which seem to confirm some problems. One of the people involved with this Cinder project was an original author of https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion https://github.com/microsoft/Pyjion (it's now being revamped by a new dev.) Dino had deep .NET/CLR implementation experience and had been the lead for IronPython which I think spawned the interest in perf improvements through Cinder. I hope this effort is more successful for him.

KaiserPro 6y ago

> Maybe they don't have the will nothing is documented in facebook. There are no advantages to doing documentation in your career.

scrollaway 6y ago

Same, i think it's pretty awesome they're sharing something like this without feeling the obligation to make it a "proper" project.