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Comment by Krishansubudhi | Hacker News Reader

I hope it does not lead to performance issues later. Python is already famous for being slower than compiled languages.

Being slower than a compiled language is not saying much for an interpreted language. But it's slower than PHP which is a closer comparison, and PHP has had JIT for six years now.

Ruby has the reputation of being a very slow language, but Python has been slower still since Ruby jumped ahead with version 1.9, almost 20 years ago. Ruby also has had far more success with JIT compilers than Python has.

>Ruby also has had far more success with JIT compilers than Python has.

Ruby is on its third (I think?) JIT now? I'm a little surprised, given Ruby's reputation as a wacky "anything goes" language with a very complex grammar, and it makes me wonder why that is? Does it have to do with the design of the runtime itself more than the language semantics? Or is it more incidental, e.g. many popular ibs are C wrappers, already generates bytecode files, and so on.

Getting a JIT right is hard work because time spent by the JIT is time not spent doing actual work, and finding the correct tradeoffs is very much an empirical problem.

The difference is that Ruby follow the BDFL model, and Ruby's BDFL was willing to allow people to experiment with in-tree development of JITs.

If the Python steering committee isn't willing to do the same, they'll probably won't get a working JIT any time soon. Developing a JIT externally, or even from a branch, is just too hard.

And PHP is quite the hot mess. Always has been, really. See the security issues over the years, including the most recent for example. Meanwhile I've never seen any serious issues for Python that's triggered mass required fixing. There's something to be said for moving carefully and ensuring things aren't broken to the best of one's ability, which is the SC's purpose.

https://app.opencve.io/cve/?product=python&vendor=python

Are you helping me to prove my point? I see 156 results, with 1 in 2023 and the rest before that. Meanwhile there are 801 results with at least a dozen in 2026 for PHP[0], and we still have 2 more months to go.

[0] https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=php

Hardly, one CVE is enough.

Not at all. I specifically stated "serious issues for Python that's triggered mass required fixing", ie. it was so bad that there were public notices for users to update ASAP. The closest thing I can find is CVE-2022-34265, and that's in Django, not Python itself.

Python is hardly used at PHP scale for Web development.

Agreed. And Python usage is far more diversified. But I fail to see the relevance of usage to a language being stable vs ridden with issues. Well, beyond that one would expect the one being so many things to so many different communities would have more issues than the other used by a single community for a single purpose.

and the biggest one, JS

It is also slower than any other interpreted dynamic language in wide use.

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