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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

Guido stepping down from BDFL may indeed be what allowed the recent speed improvements to progress; but certainly not in the way you're implying. If there is a causal effect here it seems more likely that it's because it has allowed him to concentrate more on the speed improvement work than he otherwise would have with BDFL issues taking up his time.

From what I've seen Guido has been quite actively involved in the speed up work, somewhat in the actual development but even more so in getting it merged (a problem many previous speed up attempts have failed at).

This is baseless conjecture and completely without merit. Guido was intimately involved with this speed-up work. I've disagreed with Guido over things but the things you're saying are just weird. I recommend this interview to get a slightly better glimpse of the guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DVyjdw4t9I

Guido himself is involved in the faster-cpython project though (which is responsible for these performance improvements).

https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas

He is working for microsoft who is funding this with the idea 'make this better'. He is bouncing around the idea of 'gil free' but how do you do that an not make another 2->3 mess? There are a set of interviews on YT right now with him talking about exactly what they are doing.

Ever feel like we still live in the Dark Ages where people jump to all sorts of conclusions without offering any evidence?

That innuendo thing you’re doing is all the rage these days.

I don't have a horse in this race.

And I can't find the sources. But I recall at least a few articles about Python performance improvements where the conclusion was along the lines of: "Python core devs prefer to keep the Python runtime implementation simple instead of focusing on performance". It's stuff I've read in the past 15 years or so...

And it wouldn't be unheard of, compare Tannenbaum - Minix <-> Linus - Linux.

We are more informed these days than ever. This suggests it's always been this way, we are simply more likely to catch it now.

What's disturbing is the numbing effect it seems to have. Bad behavior is increasingly on display for all to see -> We're all slowly realizing it's always been this bad, it's just more visible now -> We're kind of just becoming OK with all the noise.

Cf. blatantly wrong statements divorced from reality from major figures on social media, etc.

That said, I'm not sure whether OP is really in that weight class. It's just a "did direction change with a leadership change?" question that can be answered in a straight-forward manner by closer observers or those with first-hand experience. The danger is that others take a possibly wrong narrative forward by taking the question and ignoring the answer, in a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" sort of way.

> Cf. blatantly wrong statements divorced from reality from major figures on social media, etc.

I'm just a random guy on a random forum :-))))

Such a strange, unhelpful and speculative thing to say

Simply reading mailing lists would help. For example look at how he reacts to pep659.

This: https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/... ?

That's helpful, thanks!

Yes, I clearly remember him working with Mark on this one because he liked the idea of generating more efficient bytecode rather than more complex bytecode. Certainly not being a hinderance in this case.

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