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Comment by fijal | Hacker News Reader

I know it does sound a bit bad, but Python 3 is only now catching up. The old PyPy3 that we have is a bit terrible, because it's both old (3.2 only) and slow. Serious push would be necessary in order to get it up to 3.5 and fix the performance problems that we're just not willing to do right now. Once the commercial world catches up to python 3, we will probably too, but people using PyPy are not people who are getting excited to move to python 3, for the most part

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I think the last sentence of you really also is in part its own cause. People excited about Python 3, are not using PyPy since it seems like it is not maintained at all.

At least adding the same improvements that were added to the 2.7 interpreter would put a bit of confidence in that. Most libraries also support up until CPython3.3, which as far as I know is mostly caused by the fact that the "u" string prefix is allowed again. So just adding that and keeping the core up to date with the PyPy2.7 releases would make it usable.

This could very well inspire other devs to add support for the other features that they are missing from later releases CPython3 releases.

No, it runs deeper than that. You're mostly reaching out for pypy in case you're running into the wall with performance, one way or another. In that situation the LAST thing you want to do is to move to another language that does not give you answers to that performance problems. People are moving to go, yes, but not to python 3 in that case.

But then there are the people who've only started their codebases within the last five years, and so have been Python 3 all along.

Right. And those people are slowly getting to the problems that pypy potentially solves. We are focusing so far on widening the base of what we do, but if there is enough interest, we'll work on pypy3.

Python3 is going to be the default Python in Ubuntu next month. Do you anticipate that having any effect on your perceived user base?

FWIW, almost all of the applications I've written in Python over the past 4 years have been Py3. I'd like to use PyPy on them.

There's a similiar project to PyPy called ZipPy which is based on Graal/Truffle, except that it targets Python 3. It isn't complete, but it's probably easier to flesh out than porting PyPy to 3 itself. Check it out:

https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy

He doesn't care because that isn't where the money is coming from

It doesn't sound like just money. It sounded like he was saying that he doesn't care because there is comparatively little (historic and current) demand for PYPY3.

From a certain perspective, money == demand.

I don't blame him, pypy has always had a money problem (hence crowdfunding etc etc).

pypy3 has always supported the u'' prefix despite it otherwise being limited to 3.2 support.

"Once the commercial world catches up to python 3..."

fwiw, lack of PyPy support is one of the most common reasons I hear for people being leery of Python 3. Of course the people using PyPy aren't the people excited to move to Python 3, if they're effectively mutually exclusive.

Given that Python 3 is nearing a decade old, it is always astonishing that people are still on 2.

Well, I'm sorry that it does not look like you would want it to look like, but as a pypy dev this is not my battle - we're there to provide a fast version of the mainstream python and mainstream for now means 2.7. If it changes, we'll adapt

Isn't that change coming now? Most of the most popular libraries have python 3 support now, fedora will soon move to python 3 as default, and there are soon more developer support behind 3 than 2.[0]

[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/pythonengineering/2016/03/0...

It really is your battle. Major Python projects not supporting Python 3 in 2016 is shameful and holds back the broader adoption of Python 3.

We spent the py3k budget (almost all of it) on delivering pypy 3.2. If someone is very unhappy that it was either too expensive or we didn't deliver enough for the money we received, I can apologize.

Would be nice if the numbers on the home page were more representative of the current situation, then.

They say we have 8800 left, right?

Well, yes, but it also has this big meter that looks 60% full and gives the viewer the impression that monetary support for this feature is well underway and likely reduces the amount of donations you'll receive for it.

You can't blame someone you aren't paying for not implementing a feature you want.

They are being paid. $63K, including by me. It's their most funded donation goal.

https://sr.ht/qXYC.png

> "They are being paid. $63K, including by me. It's their most funded donation goal."

From a later comment by a dev...

"We spent the py3k budget (almost all of it) on delivering pypy 3.2."

Even the link you shared shows the pot is down to $8222. Hopefully that will increase, but I don't know what would be required to get support for later Python versions.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

There isn't a huge amount of win for going to Python 3, but there's plenty of code to change. It's not like Python 3 is 10x faster or has multi line lambdas or something.

Plus Python 2 has been updated many times in the past decade so it's not a maintainance based motivation.

Personally I code against Python 2. There just hasn't been enough motivation to learn 3 and make sure all my third party libraries work with it.

> I know it does sound a bit bad, but Python 3 is only now catching up.

Catching up as in PyPy's support for it or as in adoption of the language?

catching up in adoption

"If you build it, they will come" might apply here. Just to play devils advocate.

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