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Comment by 1st1 | Hacker News Reader

I know that instead of asking I should either go and donate more money, or go and do the coding myself, but: is it possible at all that PyPy devs can focus and produce a stable PyPy for python 3.3 (at least)?

Looks like it's almost there (but this almost stretches over many years now), it just needs a little push.

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So it's very hard to get all PyPy devs to focus on Python 3.3. Money can change the direction, but there are also features that are important to us, like warmup time and STM that we don't want to give up for 3.3.

Additionally, 3.3 has very little business value. All PyPy customers use Python 2 (the ones that can buy commercial support at least) and small performance improvements matter more to them.

> All PyPy customers use Python 2

Well yes, your customers will generally pay for the product that actually works and is useful now, and not the experimental and incomplete one that's several versions behind.

Exactly. At this point, 7 years since python 3.0 was first released, PyPy's lack of interest towards it is starting to harm the community.

That isn't a fair complaint to levy on the PyPy developers.

We are one of those paying customers (on occasion), for instance, and there is no benefit for us for work on PyPy 3 and potential large benefit from some of the upcoming work on PyPy 2. If people see benefit from PyPy 3 they should donate to motivate work on it.

Pay for it and there will be interest - its simple. It's not that they are against it - they just need to work on things that make the project alive.

And this sort of attitude is exactly why I hate Python 3 personally. "Work for free on Python 3 adoption or you're harming the Python community".

> And this sort of attitude is exactly why I hate Python 3 personally. "Work for free on Python 3 adoption or you're harming the Python community".

Sorry if I offended you with my comment, it wasn't my intent.

I guess there is a way to view this in a different light: PyPy is a major Python implementation, that is used by a lot of people. There creates ~some~ responsibility.

Also, using "hate" word is precisely the problem -- it's not a first time I hear that from PyPy devs. I just hope that you hate only that aspect of the whole "Python 3 Saga", not the language itself.

to answer just one aspect of your post - I have absolutely nothing against python 3 as a language :-)

The harm to the community was done by forking an incompatible language, fracturing it, and expecting people to spend their free time going along with it (usually in the form of writing Python 3-compatible Python 2 code, which is the worst of all possible worlds). If you're going to rewrite your code in a language that many of your users don't have installed already and several of your libraries don't yet support, there are plenty of other compelling languages to write in and fund development in.

It's also at least possible that the Python community is in better shape with a stable 2.7 and increasingly better 3.x than it would be with a Python 2.11 that just broke abi compatibility again.

Well, there is a GSoC student working on precisely that, right now.

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