Hacker News Reader

Comment by kzrdude | Hacker News Reader

How can it be the future if Py 3 support is the side project?

I can't use PyPy until it implements a real Python 3 version, i.e. one that supports asyncio, which is the real future. Until then, I will just be reading about PyPy on Hacker News and just sighing...

Edit: For everything I use, I try to find an asyncio version - Slack client [0], SSH [1], etc.

[0]: https://github.com/gfreezy/slacker-asyncio/

[1]: https://github.com/ronf/asyncssh

I second the asyncio endorsement. I started using Python 3 just to try out asyncio and never went back. It works like a dream.

After they get momentum by attracting people with their speed improvements, it will be a lot easier to attract talent and money to tackle Python 3. The reason Python 3 is on the back burner is that there simply isn't a large enough audience right now. That could change if they keep increasing their reach.

After they get momentum? But pypy has existed for a long time. They are in a maturity phase now, surely.

There are major bug fixes and compatibility and performance improvements in this release. They're also asking for a large amount of money to start a push to add Py 3 support. And NumPy support is still improving - they'll gain a lot of users as that becomes complete. None of this seems like "maturity phase", especially in terms of userbase or funding.

You don't get many cases of 20% memory consumption improvements in mature projects...

"20% consumption" is more a factor of how much memory you have installed and how much you intend to use than PyPy's maturity. I frequently use malloc()/mmap() to consume much more than 20% of system memory.

EDIT: strike this, I misunderstood.

I think they're talking about a 20% improvement in memory consumption release-over-release, not complaining that it's consuming 20% of their memory.

You should read through PostgreSQL release notes some day.

> After they get momentum by attracting people with their speed improvements, it will be a lot easier to attract talent and money to tackle Python 3

Well, this is a catch-22, because folks like me and my team won't touch it unless it's Python 3. We're not a Python shop, but have flirted with Python before. It wouldn't make sense for us to write new code in Python 2.

>The reason Python 3 is on the back burner is that there simply isn't a large enough audience right now.

Funnily enough the reason I haven't adopted using PyPy is down to their lack of Python3 support. I think you're underestimating the amount of people using Python3.

I think he means not enough companies willing to sponsor python 3 support.

Pip statistics tells us they're not that many.

Do you have any recent statistics?

I'm guessing that most people who use Python 3 are using recent versions of pip that have caching built in, so that may skew the results a bit.

From this (last year), Python 2.6 is bigger than 3:

https://caremad.io/2015/04/a-year-of-pypi-downloads/

>I'm guessing that most people who use Python 3 are using recent versions of pip that have caching built in, so that may skew the results a bit.

Since pip updates itself too, why wouldn't people using Python 2 also have newer versions?

I'm guessing a lot of people who are stuck on Python 2.6 are also stuck on old versions of pip.

Py 3 is not the future of CPython either. Even today the overwhelming majority of projects use 2, even new projects.

While this has historically been the case, Python 3.4/3.5 has really sped up adoption of Python 3, and from an open source maintainer, Python 3 is making large inroads.

Also, libraries are slowly going to drop Python 2.x support and go Python 3 only.

>While this has historically been the case, Python 3.4/3.5 has really sped up adoption of Python 3, and from an open source maintainer, Python 3 is making large inroads.

If by great inroads you mean "around 6-10% in PyPI after 8 years of trying", then yes.

But unless it gets over 30-40% it's not anywhere near significant in my charts...

As soon as Python 2.7 was put in maintenance mode I see much more people talking about Python 3. There are even libraries that are Python 3 only.

All the developers needed was a kick in the butt. If only PSF did that sooner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com