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Compatibility with C extensions seems to be the most difficult thing for an alternative implementation to achieve. PyPy struggled with this for a long time, and IIRC extension compatibility also caused the failure of Dropbox's Pyston.

Is there really no situation in which an alternative implementation that only supports "pure Python" would be useful?

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> Is there really no situation in which an alternative implementation that only supports "pure Python" would be useful?

This really depends on your definition of 'being useful'. Jython is useful in a sense, it is being used in many Big Data solutions as a way to embed Python as DSL/UDF, like Pig/Hive, etc.

However, if without support for C extensions, it is not really a Python implementation, in a sense, I can't run a python script I just gripped from internet using the so-called 'alternative' implementation. So if the point of being useful is to be a replacement, then sadly, the answer is no, it is an everything-or-nothing situation.

In the old days, before Eclipse had a scratchpad area or Java finally got a shell, it was useful to me as means to explore some Java APIs, as I did not want to spend time with either Beanshell or Grovvy since I know Python superficially since 1.6.

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