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Comment by JoachimSchipper | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand the politics surrounding Python, but I don't understand why they believe this could be "blessed" by inclusion into the repository.

Performance goals have not been met so far; it increases memory usage; PyPy is an alternative with more community support (if only because the typical Python programmer knows more Python than C++); and it makes the code much more complex, introducing lots of hard-to-debug problems, at a time when the developers already have trouble getting people to migrate to 3.x.

The 3.x branch does not need a reputation for instability.

(None of this is to say Unladen Swallow is a bad idea, or should be killed; but it should prove its worth first.)

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> but I don't understand why they believe this could be "blessed" by inclusion into the repository.

Google is, of course, a big company with lots of very smart people, and they rely on Python (and probably want to rely on it more in the future). Given that they employ Guido and also the primary developers of Unladen, the chances are very good that they will continue to vigorously improve upon it until their performance goals are met.

As far as introducing C++ goes, it's going to stay roped off in LLVM land (see [the PEP](http://python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/) for details).

As far as community support, LLVM has plenty of that.

Hmm, yes, I understand why the Unladen Swallow developers, and to a certain extent Google, would want to do that. It just seems to me that the community would benefit more by waiting a little.

By the developers' own admission, LLVM's JIT infrastructure is immature and integrating it with Python uncovered lots of issues. Sure, clang has pretty good community support, but that doesn't mean that the Python integration - or even the JIT stuff - is equally well-supported. And the Python community doesn't contain many LLVM experts, I'd wager.

Very simple: this is a PEP to improve the state of "Cpython" (this is the main python implementation right now, and has been since the invention of python).

Pypy, on the other hand, is a new implementation of Python (just like ironpython or jython), and it could eventually replace cpython in the future if it proves to be succesfull (although it would be a long way off).

In few words: Python, the language, have many implementations. Cpython is the current reference one. Unladen Swallow aims to improve it, not to replace it. Actually, even the US developers acknowledge that Pypy (or any other succesfull implementation that may come up) is the future, because it doesn't have to bear the burden imposed by the c platform.

I agree. Why are they in such a rush to get into trunk? The work they're doing is great, but their sense of entitlement about is is a bit misplaced.

This is speculation, but: Google is paying some people actual money to work on Unladen Swallow. People who have made bold claims about the performance improvements, which, apparently, were not entirely justified.

I imagine that it would be politically desirable to show success by getting officially blessed, and it would also mean that the project wouldn't just stagnate if the people now working on it were told to do something else.

More optimistically, they acknowledge that more coders would be welcome, and hope that it's easier to find those after being included in the main repository. It would also give them an edge over PyPy, their sort-of-competitor.

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