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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

It would be cool if they'd put some resource into Pypy as well. Feels like that project is such a great achievement, and with just a bit more resource it would've been an amazing alternative. As it is, it takes a long time to get the new language features out, which always hamstrings it a little.

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There's a limited number of volunteers with the experience to improve (C)Python, though, so the resources are better spent on improving the CPython implementation to such a point where PyPy is no longer necessary.

See: HHVM and PHP. HHVM is what lit the fire under the PHP team's collective butts to improve perf, and now most just run the mainline PHP interpreter (well, they did years ago when all this happened and I was still doing PHP)

Now there is a number of payed MS employees lead by Guido van Rossum working on improving (C)Python

Why don't they just replace python with PyPy, onboard PyPy team and make PyPy compatible with cpython 100 percent? Oh I think NIH syndrome.

From what I remember, PyPy has some fundamental issues with using libraries with C extensions.

That was a decade ago, alot had changed

Because if you want full ecosystem compatibility with as much performance as you can squeeze given that constraint, it makes more sense to start with the constraint satisfied rather than try to work toward it.

> Oh I think NIH syndrome.

Neither CPython nor PyPy was invented at Microsoft.

Python was by Guido who's now Microsoft employee

There were initiatives to improve CPython at Google and Dropbox, both of which switched to Golang and van Rossum left.

We'll see if this is a pattern and the same happens at Microsoft.

I believe both Google and Dropbox had a lot of Python code powering their products that they wanted to make faster. I don't think Microsoft has many large 1st party uses of Python. I think they're investing in it largely to gain developer mind-share. So for Google and Dropbox "use another language" was an option, for Microsoft it's not.

The future of pypy is with hpy, and that is direction cpython is going in, too

the userbase of pypy is a tiny fraction of cpython, likely not worth it

PyPy is very much compatible with cpython, you can just change interpreter and see it work. ( I. Many cases)

I think that's because when new codebases are written, pypy isn't on the latest version of the Python spec, so people choose CPython. If it got a little more support it could get to parity or n-1, and far more projects would start with it and stick with it.

I don't use it myself, I just see the relatively small difference in investment it would be between a great project that's slightly languishing in obscurity despite incredible talent and effort, and a genuine full alternative to CPython.

PyPy is now working onwards 3.10, to reach 3.12 quickly they only need a couple of contributors full time, which many legs can effort.

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