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Comment by unshift | Hacker News Reader

they don't expect the work to be done solely by volunteers, and are going to ask for donations on their website. it's laid out in the first paragraphs:

     The task is huge and it's unlikely that it will be 
     completed shortly based only on volunteer work, so we 
     came up with the following proposal, which splits the 
     work into several steps and sub-steps, togheter with an 
     estimate of how much money is needed to complete each 
     one.

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I really wish Google would support PyPy. It'd be such a small amount of money for them to fund development. Given the PyPy team's demonstrable success and Google's otherwise strong commitment to Python I can't understand why they don't.

That Unladden Swallow seems to have died a quiet death in the end sure doesn't support the idea that Google is easy to truely commit to such efforts, though.

My impression is that's because it was a failure technically, not because Google didn't support its goals.

I thought the story was that the Unladden Swallow team had actually started expanding into new directions after walking away from LLVM disappointed, but the project then got cancelled from higher-up?

I guess my point, in keeping with the parent, is that you'd expect Google to be interested in sustaining a team looking into performance improvements in an important part of their runtime longer-term, but that didn't happen.

Edit: On an unrelated note, it's good fun to take a look at http://speed.pypy.org/ and consider how close the averaged 4.5x speedup of PyPy trunk over CPython is to the original "make it five times faster" goal of Unladden Swallow.

There's a retrospective here which addresses quite a lot of it: http://qinsb.blogspot.com/2011/03/unladen-swallow-retrospect...

Partly it sounds like performance-critical code at Google tends to get written in a lower level language instead, so Python performance isn't as critical, even though they use it quite a bit.

Agree that it'd be great if they helped out the PyPy team though, since it's showing such great promise and has some pretty impressive numbers already.

They are invested in Go and Dart.

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