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Comment by adamckay | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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)

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