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Comment by eyegor | Hacker News Reader

I guess they abandoned the python superset idea? I followed them for a bit when they first publicly launched and they said "don't worry, we'll be a real python superset soon" and the biggest omission was no support for classes. A few years later, it looks to be missing the same set of python features but added a lot of their own custom language features.

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I'd say less abandoned, and more deferred.

It was highly aspirational goal, and practically speaking it's better right now to take inspiration from Python and have stronger integration hooks into the language (full disclosure, I work at Modular). We've specifically stopped using the "superset of Python" language to be more accurate about what the language is meant for right now.

Deferred means it’s coming, but we don’t know if it will ever come. I’d bet it won’t.

Being a Python superset and being fast are fundamentally in tension. It would be possible, maybe, to have a Python superset where you get the highest performance as long as you avoided the dynamic features of Python. However, I suspect it would make the user base grumpy to have a hidden performance cliff that suddenly showed up when you used dynamic features (or depended on code that did the same).

The dynamic features of Python are no different from the dynamic features of Smalltalk, Self, Common Lisp, but people have been educated to expect otherwise due to the adoption failure of dynamic compilers in Python community.

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