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What's the difference between this and pypy?

dharmab 6y ago
Pyston is a fork of CPython and aims to maintain drop-in compatibility. PyPy is a completely separate implementation which is not fully compatible with CPython.
- neolog 6y ago
  > not fully compatible It's really quite close, and https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy is intended to make them even closer.
  - salmo 6y ago
    It's super-promising and actually looks pretty ergonomic in comparison, but it'll take rewrites of existing C API leveraging packages. There's not really a way around that, since they have to interact with refcounting now vs a more abstract mechanism (eg. hpy's handles) that shield from the underlying GC mechanism. My fear here is that this will be a cool project a few projects really looking for cross-interpreter python support leverage, but will otherwise be a non-issue. It doesn't need to show performance improvement on PyPy or Pyston as much as <=0 performance degradation of CPython, which will stay everyone's primary target. I guess when it shows to be mature, it'll just be a question for each library of whether the work is worth supporting alternative interpreters for their user-base or personal lives or job.
ben-schaaf 6y ago
Pyston claims 30% performance improvement over cpython while maintaining compatibility, pypy claims it's 4.2x faster but has some compatibility issues irrc.
- tempay 6y ago
  It's pretty good in terms of compatibility these days. Conda-forge has builds of most packages available for both cPython and PyPy on macOS/Linux/aarch64/ppc64le: https://conda-forge.org/status/#pypy https://conda-forge.org/status/#pypy
- viraptor 6y ago
  Pypy's claim comes from a set of common Python benchmarks. Pyston claim comes from company's webserver benchmarks. These may be comparable, but may be also apples-to-oranges.
- kmod 6y ago
  We use completely separate benchmarks, where our Pyston benchmarks are quite a bit "harder" and PyPy is only 12% faster on them while using 4x the memory.

Pyston is a fork of CPython and aims to maintain drop-in compatibility. PyPy is a completely separate implementation which is not fully compatible with CPython.

neolog 6y ago
> not fully compatible It's really quite close, and https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy is intended to make them even closer.
- salmo 6y ago
  It's super-promising and actually looks pretty ergonomic in comparison, but it'll take rewrites of existing C API leveraging packages. There's not really a way around that, since they have to interact with refcounting now vs a more abstract mechanism (eg. hpy's handles) that shield from the underlying GC mechanism. My fear here is that this will be a cool project a few projects really looking for cross-interpreter python support leverage, but will otherwise be a non-issue. It doesn't need to show performance improvement on PyPy or Pyston as much as <=0 performance degradation of CPython, which will stay everyone's primary target. I guess when it shows to be mature, it'll just be a question for each library of whether the work is worth supporting alternative interpreters for their user-base or personal lives or job.

ben-schaaf 6y ago

Pyston claims 30% performance improvement over cpython while maintaining compatibility, pypy claims it's 4.2x faster but has some compatibility issues irrc.

tempay 6y ago
It's pretty good in terms of compatibility these days. Conda-forge has builds of most packages available for both cPython and PyPy on macOS/Linux/aarch64/ppc64le: https://conda-forge.org/status/#pypy https://conda-forge.org/status/#pypy
viraptor 6y ago
Pypy's claim comes from a set of common Python benchmarks. Pyston claim comes from company's webserver benchmarks. These may be comparable, but may be also apples-to-oranges.
kmod 6y ago
We use completely separate benchmarks, where our Pyston benchmarks are quite a bit "harder" and PyPy is only 12% faster on them while using 4x the memory.