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Why has it taken so much longer for CPython to get a JIT than, say, PyPy? I would imagine the latter has far less engineering effort and funding put into it.
by meisel 3y ago
Why has it taken so much longer for CPython to get a JIT than, say, PyPy? I would imagine the latter has far less engineering effort and funding put into it.
- kstrauser 3y agoFor the longest time, CPython was deliberately optimized for simplicity. That's a perfectly reasonable choice: it's easier to reason about, easier for new maintainers to learn it, easier to alter, easier to fix when it breaks, etc. Also, CPUs are pretty good at running simple code very quickly. It's only fairly recently that there's been critical mass of people who thought that performance trumps simplicity, and even then, it's only to a point.
- nomel 3y ago> It's only fairly recently that there's been critical mass of people who thought that performance trumps simplicity This definitely wasn't true, from the user perspective. And, I'm not even convinced it's some "critical mass" of developers. These changes aren't coming from some mass of developers, there's coming from a few experts that had a clear plan, backed by the sanity of the huge disconnect that languages are actually meant for users of the language, not the developers of the language.
- arccy 3y agocritical mass of cpython devs
- MBCook 3y agoI believe PyPy was written knowing it wouldn’t work with many C/C++ libraries used in the Python world. That made it much easier to get bigger gains than if they wanted 100% backwards compatibility with CPython.