4 ms·

Important enough, or benefits them directly? I have no good guesses how improving Python's performance would benefit them, but I would guess that's the real rea

Important enough, or benefits them directly? I have no good guesses how improving Python's performance would benefit them, but I would guess that's the real reason.

HPsquared 10mo ago
I wonder if this is related to Python in Excel. You'll have lots of people running numerical stuff written in Python, running on Microsoft servers.
mkoubaa 10mo ago
A lot of commercial engineering and scientific software runs on windows.
andix 10mo ago
I guess there are some Python workloads on Azure, Microsoft provides a lot of data analysis and LLM tools as a service (not paid by CPU minutes). Saving CPU cycles there directly translates to financial savings.
acdha 10mo ago
Think about how much effort they have put into things like Pylance and general python support in VAC. Clearly they think they have enough users that this matters to that a first class experience is worth having.
pjmlp 10mo ago
Microsoft was the one hiring Guido out of retirement, and alongside Facebook finally kicking off the CPython JIT efforts. Python is one of the Microsoft blessed languages on their devblogs.
- throw1ahs 10mo ago
  The project was first suggested by Mark Shannon. Van Rossum inserted himself into the project. Faster CPython people have been fired by Microsoft last year. Generally not that much has happened in 5 years, sometimes 10-15% improvements are posted that are later offset by bloat. I think the project started in 3.10, so 3.9 is the last version to compare to. The improvements aren't that great, I don't think any other language would get so much positive feedback for so little.
  - pjmlp 10mo ago
    I know what happened last year, my point was the prior history that lead to that effort. https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossums-ambitious-plans-for-improving-python-performance https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossums-ambitious-plans-for... Agree with the sentiment, Python is the only dynamic language where it seems a graveyard from efforts. And nope it isn't the dynamism per se, Smalltalk, Self, Common Lisp are just as dynamic, with lots of possibilities to reboot the world and mess up JIT efforts, as any change impacts the whole image. Naturally those don't have internals exposed to C where anything goes, and the culture C libraries are seen as the language libraries.
    - boulos 10mo ago
      Ehh, PHP fits that bill and is clearly optimizable. All sorts of things worked well for PHP, including the original HipHop, HHVM, my own work, and the mainline PHP runtime. Python has some semantics and behaviors that are particularly hostile to optimization, but as the Faster Python and related efforts have suggested, the main challenge is full compatibility including extensions plus the historical desire for a simple implementation within CPython. There are limits to retrofitting truly high performance to any of these languages. You want enough static, optional, or gradual typing to make it fast enough in the common case. That's why you also saw the V8 folks give up and make Dart, the Facebook ones made Hack, etc. It's telling that none of those gained truly broad adoption though. Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem.
      - gsnedders 10mo ago
        > Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem. And this is no small part of why Java and JS have frequently been pushing VM performance forward — there’s enough code people very much care about continuing to work on performance. (Though the two care about different things mostly: Java cares much more about long-term performance, and JS cares much more about short-term performance.) It doesn’t hurt they’re both languages which are relatively static compared with e.g. Python, either.
- __turbobrew__ 10mo ago
  How to stay employed for life: create a programming language which is pretty good, but with some fatal flaws (GIL, typing, slow) and you are set for life.
  - johncolanduoni 10mo ago
    I don’t know about calling them fatal, but inculcating a culture that believes the flaws are inescapable laws of reality is probably key.
- nurettin 10mo ago
  + It is also blessed by PowerBI and recently, Excel.

Important enough, or benefits them directly? I have no good guesses how improving Python's performance would benefit them, but I would guess that's the real reason.

HPsquared 10mo ago

I wonder if this is related to Python in Excel. You'll have lots of people running numerical stuff written in Python, running on Microsoft servers.

mkoubaa 10mo ago

A lot of commercial engineering and scientific software runs on windows.

andix 10mo ago

I guess there are some Python workloads on Azure, Microsoft provides a lot of data analysis and LLM tools as a service (not paid by CPU minutes). Saving CPU cycles there directly translates to financial savings.

acdha 10mo ago

Think about how much effort they have put into things like Pylance and general python support in VAC. Clearly they think they have enough users that this matters to that a first class experience is worth having.

pjmlp 10mo ago

Microsoft was the one hiring Guido out of retirement, and alongside Facebook finally kicking off the CPython JIT efforts. Python is one of the Microsoft blessed languages on their devblogs.

throw1ahs 10mo ago
The project was first suggested by Mark Shannon. Van Rossum inserted himself into the project. Faster CPython people have been fired by Microsoft last year. Generally not that much has happened in 5 years, sometimes 10-15% improvements are posted that are later offset by bloat. I think the project started in 3.10, so 3.9 is the last version to compare to. The improvements aren't that great, I don't think any other language would get so much positive feedback for so little.
- pjmlp 10mo ago
  I know what happened last year, my point was the prior history that lead to that effort. https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossums-ambitious-plans-for-improving-python-performance https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossums-ambitious-plans-for... Agree with the sentiment, Python is the only dynamic language where it seems a graveyard from efforts. And nope it isn't the dynamism per se, Smalltalk, Self, Common Lisp are just as dynamic, with lots of possibilities to reboot the world and mess up JIT efforts, as any change impacts the whole image. Naturally those don't have internals exposed to C where anything goes, and the culture C libraries are seen as the language libraries.
  - boulos 10mo ago
    Ehh, PHP fits that bill and is clearly optimizable. All sorts of things worked well for PHP, including the original HipHop, HHVM, my own work, and the mainline PHP runtime. Python has some semantics and behaviors that are particularly hostile to optimization, but as the Faster Python and related efforts have suggested, the main challenge is full compatibility including extensions plus the historical desire for a simple implementation within CPython. There are limits to retrofitting truly high performance to any of these languages. You want enough static, optional, or gradual typing to make it fast enough in the common case. That's why you also saw the V8 folks give up and make Dart, the Facebook ones made Hack, etc. It's telling that none of those gained truly broad adoption though. Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem.
    - gsnedders 10mo ago
      > Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem. And this is no small part of why Java and JS have frequently been pushing VM performance forward — there’s enough code people very much care about continuing to work on performance. (Though the two care about different things mostly: Java cares much more about long-term performance, and JS cares much more about short-term performance.) It doesn’t hurt they’re both languages which are relatively static compared with e.g. Python, either.
__turbobrew__ 10mo ago
How to stay employed for life: create a programming language which is pretty good, but with some fatal flaws (GIL, typing, slow) and you are set for life.
- johncolanduoni 10mo ago
  I don’t know about calling them fatal, but inculcating a culture that believes the flaws are inescapable laws of reality is probably key.
nurettin 10mo ago
+ It is also blessed by PowerBI and recently, Excel.