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Comment by MostAwesomeDude | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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