HPy: A better C API for Python? | Hacker News Reader

HPy: A better C API for Python?

lwn.net

138 pointsmkesper9 comments

HPy was recently discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26625398

I remember reading an article or two about Python being quite energy inefficient as languages go, reaching very low on a chart like. I don't know if and/or how much Hpy will improve this. Definitely have to parrot the article and say the situation a matter of "wait, keep watching and see", or better yet if you can manage it, "contribute, keep contributing, and look ahead".

No one has ever claimed that python is energy conservative.

There is a general understanding that you are trading machine efficiency for developer efficiency.

There were attempts at making it more efficient (see ironpython, which is dead now).

If you drop a serious bottleneck of code into C you are going to see massive improvements provided you don't need to marshal between python/c a lot (aka, if you can dump a ton of data, do a ton of work in C, then dump it back to python, you'll be sitting pretty).

> There were attempts at making it more efficient (see ironpython, which is dead now).

IronPython seems to be on life support (it had a bugfix release for .NET 5 late last year), and no longer an MS project, but its not quite dead.

But pointing to IronPython alone is weird, as that was more about interface woth the rest of .NET than machine efficiency, and there are a number of major, live projects with efficiency as one of their central goals: PyPy, mypyc, Cython, for instance.

Had to help out with some python the other day. About 15 years since I used python. A couple of hours to figure out how to get it running locally. Then I fixed the various issues. Mostly horrible performance problems.

All told half a day of effort.

Felt amazing being able to be productive so quickly on ancient abandoned code. The badly written algorithm was just obvious in its wrongness.

As someone just starting off with python, how do you become efficient in it? My efficiency in C# is great due to intellisense, LINQ, and compile time errors. How do I unlock python efficiency?

Python has (arguably) better library support. So if you need to do something with some sort of work that requires a library, you are usually in luck that someone in the community has created something for you to just leverage.

Python is also default installed on most systems. So creating code in python would allow it to be run almost anywhere with very little issue (think of things you'd rather not do in bash/bat files etc).

Honestly tho, if you just want IDE stuff, vscode and a shit ton of others will give you intellisense to a degree and really help you out there.

I believe you could counter LINQ with basically any sort of ORM type implementation for said platform.

With python you are really gluing things together as you see fit and being able to determine each sub piece. When I was a professional C# dev many years ago it always felt like I #1 should rely on what MS put out; and lean on third party libraries only if I had to.

Both environments have their ups and downs.

HPy is (sort of) a replacement for CPython's normal API for C Extensions. It has nothing to do with "efficiency" or the performance of python itself.

I wish I could delete this comment. It was dumb of me to think a C API would help improve Python's efficiency/performance outside of maybe a few libraries making use of it under the hood or something.

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