Pyston is neat, but I'm a bit unclear. Why should we invest time and effort into more proprietary shenanigans?
Not a rhetorical question BTW. A pluggable JIT for Python could be a boon for some projects at my dayjob, but if it's proprietary that would put a bit of a damper on things.
[0]: https://blog.pyston.org/2021/05/05/pyston-v2-2-faster-and-op...
[1]: https://github.com/pyston/pyston/blob/pyston_main/LICENSE
Didn't Microsoft also recently announce something similar? I could have sworn I saw a thread about it here recently, but i couldn't find it again. Or was that the Facebook project Cinder?
There are so many "high performance Python" projects now (and in the past) that it's hard to keep track!
So now there is legitimate incentive to develop and get adoption for your own "faster Python" project, which (if successful) could end up being used by millions of developers around the world. Imagine the clout and name recognition that would come with being the company that finally made Python fast after 20+ years of failed attempts. Not to mention all the free labor (bug reports and PRs) from the open-source community, all while optimizing the tool to serve their own internal technical needs above all else.
That's my only explanation for why these companies are all DIYing their own project and not contributing to existing efforts like PyPy and HPy. I think ultimately this work is all good for the Python ecosystem, but clearly I'm a bit cynical and skeptical of large tech companies' motivations in general.
Open sourcing things increases the likelihood it'll be upsteamed (the use case is more obvious) and increases the likelihood you'll get support (although you now have a community to support). In addition, it's easier to plead your case if upstream breaks something (here's my source vs vague statements about an internal thing at company x)