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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Congratulations!

Looking forward to the day PyPy becomes the reference implementation.

In many cases, you want to be careful about using JIT'd platforms. Many people forget that the memory requirements skyrocket. When you want to use a language on many different platforms, including embedded, you start to see how having a JIT interpreter as your reference platform can be disadvantageous. CPython isn't exactly slow either, especially when you consider many 'intensive' modules are written directly in C.

Pypy should stay as it is, an experiment that can be used for people who require more performance for certain workloads. Of course, having part of your language written in C for CPython can hurt sometimes, when you can't easily use the functionality on other interpreters.

almost agree, except for the 'experiment' part. i don't want it to be an experiment, i want it to be a production-ready interpreter that i can use instead of cpython with minimal effort when i know i can trade memory for speed.

You are right, but having a JIT able to generate fast code means you can avoid writing C code at all, just look how fast Julia already is.

I'm with you on that one. But bear in mind it doesn't support Python 3 yet, so it might still be some way away.

I wonder how long? I searched for a roadmap, but found none.

Donate here: http://pypy.org/py3donate.html

God yes. I wish the CPython people would just capitulate and throw themselves behind it.

Because who cares of existing, running, legacy code, right?

Do you mean the people who haven't upgraded from Python 2.7 to Python 3?

The people who haven't upgraded to Python 3 in their projects are probably mostly people with dependencies on py2.7 libraries. Happened to me in my last project. I started using pypy until some bug in pypy prevented me from using an important package. Switched to python 3 until some other dependency wasn't available. So it's a pity, but i was more or less forced to use py2.7 (without putting major effort into 3rd party libraries).

And you did put at least the same amount of effort as to write this comment to report the bug to pypy devs and/or library devs right?

How often do people do that for CPython?

Less often because CPython characteristics are well known and there is no baseline to compare to.

Why does this have to be so political? Why does it matter to you if CPython continues to exist, just use PyPy if you want to?

The Python Foundation should really give some money/developers to these guys

http://pyfound.blogspot.de/2011/05/pypy-receives-us10000-at-...

They already did that.

I hope that that never happens. CPython is still pretty readable, and reference implementations should be simple and easy to learn from.

Actually, I'd like it if somebody hacked up a very very simple and naive Python interpreter and nominated that for the reference implementation instead.

Are you saying PyPy is unreadable?

I have not read large amounts of it, but the interpreter is written in RPython. Surely it's easier to read than the CPython source?

readability is probably not the right term, but I think he means easy to understand. Doesn't matter how elegant PyPy's code is, it'll surely be more complex than an straight forward interpreter.

Actually if you read the PyPy interpreter's source, all you'll see is a straightforward interpreter.

PyPy is a straightforward interpreter. It's just written in a language with good JIT compiler (RPython).

Small correction: a language for which good JIT compilers can be generated for interpreters written in it.

No, it isn't. PyPy code is very poorly commented and documented, there's a lot going on inside the same codebase. So far, it feels like the only people who hack it are the ones who wrote it. This needs to be sorted out before we see mass adoption.

I'm saying that it's big. Specialization requires special cases, which require more lines of code. One should be able to reason about the entirety of a Python implementation, and that's very difficult to do for PyPy.

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