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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

I know what happened last year, my point was the prior history that lead to that effort.

https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossums-ambitious-plans-for...

Agree with the sentiment, Python is the only dynamic language where it seems a graveyard from efforts.

And nope it isn't the dynamism per se, Smalltalk, Self, Common Lisp are just as dynamic, with lots of possibilities to reboot the world and mess up JIT efforts, as any change impacts the whole image.

Naturally those don't have internals exposed to C where anything goes, and the culture C libraries are seen as the language libraries.

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Ehh, PHP fits that bill and is clearly optimizable. All sorts of things worked well for PHP, including the original HipHop, HHVM, my own work, and the mainline PHP runtime.

Python has some semantics and behaviors that are particularly hostile to optimization, but as the Faster Python and related efforts have suggested, the main challenge is full compatibility including extensions plus the historical desire for a simple implementation within CPython.

There are limits to retrofitting truly high performance to any of these languages. You want enough static, optional, or gradual typing to make it fast enough in the common case. That's why you also saw the V8 folks give up and make Dart, the Facebook ones made Hack, etc. It's telling that none of those gained truly broad adoption though. Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem.

> Performance isn't all that matters, especially once you have an established codebase and ecosystem.

And this is no small part of why Java and JS have frequently been pushing VM performance forward — there’s enough code people very much care about continuing to work on performance. (Though the two care about different things mostly: Java cares much more about long-term performance, and JS cares much more about short-term performance.)

It doesn’t hurt they’re both languages which are relatively static compared with e.g. Python, either.

> you also saw the V8 folks give up and make Dart

V8 still got substantially faster after the first team left to do Dart. A lot of runtime optimizations (think object model optimizations), several new compilers, and a lot of GC work.

It's a huge investment to make a dynamic language go as fast as JS these days.

> It's a huge investment to make a dynamic language go as fast as JS these days.

Yes, and on the other hand, other language implementations like CPython can learn from everything people figured out for JS.

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