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Comment by ram_rar | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of value in leveraging existing programming languages than rewriting in something else. My team rewrote large chunks of code from python -> Go and it wasn't a pleasant experience. We were able to justify it, since it _inadvertently_ reduced our infra cost.

But, if we could make python a lot faster at compiler level, it doesn't break the dev experience and lengthen dev on-boarding time. This helps the team productivity as a whole. I hope the CPython community is able to leverage few things from Cinder. This would benefit the entire python community.

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If you don’t mind sharing, what was it about the experience that made it unpleasant?

Why didn't you profile the Python code and only rewrited the hot loops?

Not op but two reasons would be:

1. The computations are distributed enough that there is no one hot loop

2. Go is shit at integrating with other software without IPC, ipc could be infeasible or have too much overhead, it also complicates building / bundling / shipping a lot

Thanks :

1. In distributed computing, there are usually minimal communication because nodes communication is costly, the bottleneck can still be the hot loop on each nodes.

2. When optimizing the hot loop only, it can be quickly written in Cython or C, since the scope is usually a lot smaller, so no need to use Go.

> In distributed computing

I didn't mean distributed computing, I meant distributed through the program. Not all programs actually have a hot loop.

> When optimizing the hot loop only, it can be quickly written in Cython or C, since the scope is usually a lot smaller, so no need to use Go.

That assumes proficiency in C, and it still complicates building / bundling / shipping a lot, the first bit of native code into a Python codebase is a huge investment and a significant step back in convenience in many ways.

Did you rewrite it by hand or use a transpiler?

Mostly from scratch. I am yet to see a Python -> Go transpiler which generates human readable/maintainable code.

Try http://github.com/adsharma/py2many

tests/expected/*.go has generally human readable code.

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