Pyston is already at the "our incredible journey" stage ("We’re very excited about these changes and [...] Marius and I (Kevin) are planning to gradually reduc

Pyston is already at the "our incredible journey" stage ("We’re very excited about these changes and [...] Marius and I (Kevin) are planning to gradually reduce our time investment in the project"). Pypy, as a practical software deployment runtime has been and will remain esoteric (I do absolutely think that they had a positive impact on the wider python community, both in terms of dissemination of ideas and also practical engineering artifacts). But what's their market share relative to CPython? A thousandth of a percent or less? Has anyone actually built a significant business on top of Pypy? There is, IMO no realistic path at that point that Pypy could become a viable CPython alternative. They are effectively competing with a hostile platform they need to maintain an extremely high amount of compatibility with, and that can and does move in directions that invalidate some fundamental engineering choices they make. Practical end results include that they're stuck w/ a lot of crippling design decisions (GIL, FFI API etc.) and a core part that is still in 2.7 land (RPython) and have historically mostly only been compatible to very outdated versions of python. This has improved a lot, but the next time CPython throws another curve ball the same thing is bound to happen again. The only chance they really had was to be compellingly enough faster or otherwise superior that community pressure would have forced the CPython team into adopting a much more collaborative stance. That seems very unlikely to happen, now after all this time, given that now CPython is catching up and they have the albatross of the C extension ecosystem around their neck. Almost anyone who cares about python performance outside of algorithmic programming competitions will be using C extensions where Pypy offers no compelling advantage, some disadvantages, and by the momentum of the existing eco-system is unable to develop a superior alternative.