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Comment by wbond | Hacker News Reader

Pypy3 is a separate project. From previous comments by the PyPy team, their customers are almost all targeting Python 2, hence Python 3 doesn’t get nearly as much attention.

Pypy3’s last release was 2.4.0 in 2014. It targets Python 3.2, which is relatively unsupported compared to Python 3.3.

Here is a recent comment by a core member of the team on future Pypy3 work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262150.

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> their customers are almost all targeting Python 2

Odd statement. How can they have any customers who target Python 3 if they don't support it?

Could be they never received as many (or many) potential customers.

There have been a few services/apps I was looking to use but had to turn down after talking to them because they didn't support Linux (Xamarin, Codename One, etc.) They all said they didn't receive as many requests for Linux as they did for Mac or Windows. I guess this would be similar.

I think you're confusing cause and effect. In open source world, you can't charge for something that exists. It needs to be a need to do so. In order to push PyPy into putting significant effort from a core team - we would need exactly that. A big chunk of money dedicated to just that. We've spent all the money we got and we did get something out of it. But it needs to be more seriously supported in order to kickstart that. Obviously people are free on whatever they want in their free time, but unless there is enough to push the PyPy3 support to a significant postion, it's unlikely to move at a higher pace.

The vast majority of python codebases are still in python 2, even though many of the popular framework have been ported to 3, and there's no reason for most of them to bother with the amount of work it can be to port to py3 when they're happy with py2. Whether it be devs like Dropbox or open source software like NVDA, they will stay in the world of python 2 for the years to come. The amount of customers they could get by supporting python 3 is definitely not worth the effort unless they get paid explicitly for it.

In terms of libraries, python 3 is "mostly" ready (though there are still issues with highly popular ones like wxwidgets. Or amazing tools like Pyjamas, which replicated GWT with Python instead of Java. Or Google AppEngine, which still shows no sign of moving to 3.) but large codebases outside of highly worked on web frameworks haven't moved on and there's not enough gain to justify the effort it takes to port them. The Python 3 debacle caused a lot of devs to also look at other languages for new projects. Old python 2 codebases will stay python 2, but new projects might not necessarily be python at all. The anger with Python 3 is real.

"Looking at these graphs, we can see that in the past year Python 3.x has grown from roughly 2% of the total downloads from PyPI to roughly 5-6%"

I expect things like AppEngine to deprecate Python rather than port to 3, when/if python 2 reaches EOL and not enough people gather to maintain or even evolve that old branch.

Python 3 users are a vocal bunch, but the war they're fighting is a lost one.

>The anger with Python 3 is real.

But why?

Because here is a quick list of just over 100 things that have to be considered to port and maintain compatibility between the two:

http://python-future.org/compatible_idioms.html

Python3 is a different language than Python 2.7 and there is no compelling reason to move from 2.7 to 3.

Most of what would have been compelling reasons are being handled in PyPy. PyPy is the present and future of Python and that future is 2.7.

If you want to use just Python 3, after the initial port there is no issues with having to maintain Python 2/3 compatibility.

Working in open source, there is going to be a time when I stop supporting Python 2.x, and already I and others are building libraries that are Python 3.x first, are developed on Python 3.x and Python 2.x is an after thought in testing.

PyPy will eventually have to catch up to 3.x, and no, the future is definitely not 2.7.

No matter how hard you're wishing it to be true, does not make it so. PyPy will "have" to catch up? in the name of what? PyPy is but one of the many projects that are still thriving in the 2.x ecosystem, there's even a competitor to PyPy that was launched 2 years ago that is also a 2.x exclusive: Pyston. https://blog.pyston.org Yes, a very new implementation project that happens to focus on 2.7.

Python 2 gets all the better runtimes. Long after the end of life of the official CPython 2.7, we will still be running 2.x programs, and doing it on much better runtimes than CPython.

We've been hearing the same tirades of Python 3's future over and over again by its partisans ever since its release in 2008. 8 years have passed since then. 8 years will pass and Python 3 will still have nothing but a minority of vocal open source users. Python will be treated as a legacy language the way COBOL and BASIC are treated before py3 starts picking up any steam. That's kinda what some companies are already doing, like Dropbox. Switching to Go here and there, while keeping the maintenance of their very large 2.7 python codebase with absolutely no intention whatsoever of moving that behemoth to 3.x. Why bother? they could write new software features, fix bugs and so on instead of waste time on porting. Why waste so much time on porting when it brings so little benefits? Programming is ultimately about problem solving. Porting to python 3 doesn't make my software better. It's certainly not running any more efficient either, that's PyPy and Pyston territory (Using PyPy can allow you, under some circumstances, to seriously cut down the amount of hardware you need). It doesn't magically add new features, or fix the bugs.

Python 3 will go down in history as the best example of what you should never do while growing a language. People like to complain about C++'s complexity, but unlike Python 3, C++ isn't threatened by its own past selves, and that's despite adding features that are arguably far more compelling to look into than the various differences between Py2 and 3. It's also very hard to regain lost trust. The trust that was lost after what was done to Python with Python 3 can never be fully regained. I can write software in C++, Java, C#, Javascript, Lisp, Perl 5 (which is still being worked on) and so on and have an expectation not to have to go through something like Py3. To a lesser extent, even Ruby, although it breaks compatibility from time to time, it never went through anything as major in a one time fashion as Py3 did, which is why the ruby ecosystem hasn't self destructed.

With moore's law being utterly dead, the fact that all the interesting improvements to language implementation are happening only to 2.x rather than 3.x really contradicts your idea that the future lies in 3.x.

>Python3 is a different language than Python 2.7 and there is no compelling reason to move from 2.7 to 3.

That's just not true at all. Asyncio is a perfect example.

Trollius:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/trollius

Or, better, gevent:

http://www.gevent.org

No compelling reason. That is why 8 years later 2.7 is still used by the majority.

> Trollius: > > https://pypi.python.org/pypi/trollius

You should point to: https://trollius.readthedocs.org/ which states that it is discontinued and you should just move on to Python 3.

I think you should give asyncio a try first (especially on Python 3.5 with async/await keywords) before stating there's no compelling reasons. Another strong (for me) reason to go with Python 3 is that it has bunch of old warts removed. The code is just easier to maintain.

> Because here is a quick list of just over 100 things that have to be considered to port and maintain compatibility between the two:

> http://python-future.org/compatible_idioms.html

It's bit a BS, majority and I would say 90% of that you can simply use the Python 3 syntax and both Python 2 and 3 will accept it.

Also many people who program in Python 2.7 already use the new syntax without even realizing it.

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