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Comment by oneTbrain23 | Hacker News Reader

I think at this point it is better Meta to ditch python and invest in a new programming language that mimics exactly wording for wording of python but without GIL. Google did it with their Carbon for C++, Go for C/D/C++. Microsoft even wrestle with Java for .NET and at one point their J++ 2 decades ago. Meta shpuld create their own. Maybe dump their resources into Modular. Python at this point is basically a C++ with a hotch potch of features and codebase. Start from clean like Mozilla Rust would help entire programming a lot than invest in a niche subset feature of Python which they dont have any control at all (I am speaking from corporate point of view). Python is like Perl, it will continue to have its place even decades later to be generic or niche for AI. But the rest of us may be moving on to something more specialized and cleaner like Rust, Ruby, Modular, etc.

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> Python is like Perl,

Perl never had anywhere near the wealth of libraries and community support Python enjoys today. The language is used nearly everywhere, from utility-scripts to build piplines, desktop applications, webservice backends, all the way up to scientific computing and AI.

Python shines because of it's ecosystem and community support, which I'd guess (without having any numbers to back this up) may very well be unmatched among programming languages today. Maybe Java and C/C++ come somewhat close, but I'd doubt even these behemoths would stand a chance in a 1:1 comparison for sheer size and versatility of what for Python is just a quick `pip install` away.

Any language that want's to replace Python, even internally at a company, will either have to deal with the fallout of leaving all that behind, OR be compatible with Python to an extend that it doesn't matter. And that's a really tall order.

They’ve kind of done that with Cinder https://github.com/facebookincubator/cinder. Threads and Instagram lie on top of this and it’s essentially a fork of Python 3.10.

I think the problem there is even a company like Meta wants to rest on the shoulders of the giant Python community. It makes sense for Meta to try to get parts of Cinder into Python.

Isn’t that called PyPy? Or is the problem that Meta has a lot of CPython extensions

Also Carbon is still very much an experiment and not used for much. Google has a lot more Rust in production now, especially in Android and Chrome.

PyPy has a GIL, so it wouldn't solve this particular issue.

why not just use an existing language? ATen (pytorch’s autodiff engine) is written in C++ anyway, so why not use that?

i really don’t understand the trend with launching a new language every time it seems convenient; it may have the advantage of being made at {company}, but this is also its great downside: it exists, is maintained, and used only with relation to the project/company that prompted its creation

for example, swift is only used for swiftui and some other apple specific stuff, and no sane person is going to write an unrelated serious project in it

> I think at this point it is better Meta to ditch python and invest in a new programming language that mimics exactly wording for wording of python

Wouldn’t that still be Python, just a different implementation?

Agreed, they should port their AI stacks to a functional language. It looks like these efforts are designed to prop up Python for the scientific stack.

migrating from python to Ruby for something cleaner ?!

From the top post in that thread:

Most of this work has been on Javascript, which is single-threaded and less mutable than Python, but PyPy has also made some significant contributions. PyPy has a GIL.

There is also work on Ruby. Ruby is even more mutable than Python, but also has a GIL. Work on Ruby mirrors that on Javascript.

Ruby's GVL is no longer truly global because of Ractors, which are a different approach to reducing the impact of a global lock.

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