Dropbox Announces Their Own Open-Source Python

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Dropbox Announces Their Own Open-Source Python

The Dropbox cloud storage provider has announced Pyston, their own open-source JIT compiler to Python. The big focus with Pyston is on speed...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY1NDc

[schmidtbag]

Very interesting. Unfortunately, they're only targeting python 2.7. For a brand new design, you'd think they'd use 3.x since the JIT compilers for that are either rare, outdated, or unstable. At this point, most python libraries that actually matter are already ported to 3.x. If things like Qt and pygame/SDL work with pyston, I'm definitely going to try it out.

[Calinou]

I would like the same thing to happen to their daemons.

[litfan]

Python is dying. Its being destroyed on all fronts from Javascript/Dart to Go/Ruby. The devs just killed their own language with the 2.7 to 3.0 screw-up. Dropbox isn't even supporting 3.0 yet the devs continue down this dual language version path. It's a complete disaster.

[[wrd]]

people have tried to use llvm to optimize python already

An intern at google tried that and it's called unladen swallow [1].

it seems alot more promising to look into the openjdk world. Some people are working on truffle a specializing ast implementation.
There is an experimental branch that implements this for python3 ([2]).

Actually LLVM is a pretty bad JIT. Some people tried to make an OpenJDK backend that uses LLVM to make a plattform independent JIT called Shark. It was very slow ([3]).


[1]: https://code.google.com/p/unladen-swallow/
[2]: https://bitbucket.org/ssllab/zippy
[3]: http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/ZeroSharkFaq

[schmidtbag]

Python is dying. Its being destroyed on all fronts from Javascript/Dart to Go/Ruby. The devs just killed their own language with the 2.7 to 3.0 screw-up. Dropbox isn't even supporting 3.0 yet the devs continue down this dual language version path. It's a complete disaster.

You clearly have no idea how python works if you think any of those languages you mentioned are competing with it - you're comparing apples to oranges. Ruby is the only language that is similar in usage/purpose to python, and it is notably less popular. Also, the jump the 3.0 wasn't a bad idea. While breaking the compatibility was a little annoying, python supplies scripts to convert your code. I had a roughly 2500 line code that I converted from 2.7 to 3.3 by hand and it only took me an hour to do.

People don't switch to python 3.x because if they didn't write their code for it, there's a good chance it's going to be a pain to convert. As long as people are actively using 2.7, it isn't going to die, and if it works for them and is still being maintained, I don't really see that as a problem.

[litfan]

You clearly have no idea how python works if you think any of those languages you mentioned are competing with it - you're comparing apples to oranges. Ruby is the only language that is similar in usage/purpose to python, and it is notably less popular. Also, the jump the 3.0 wasn't a bad idea. While breaking the compatibility was a little annoying, python supplies scripts to convert your code. I had a roughly 2500 line code that I converted from 2.7 to 3.3 by hand and it only took me an hour to do.

People don't switch to python 3.x because if they didn't write their code for it, there's a good chance it's going to be a pain to convert. As long as people are actively using 2.7, it isn't going to die, and if it works for them and is still being maintained, I don't really see that as a problem.

Bullshit. Google's Go directly competes with python on the web server side. Javascript is directly competing with Python for server apps now too. Virtually every company I work with is switching away from Django to node.js and other options.

You're the clueless one if you think Python has any chance int he next 5 years to remain relevant.

[Pajn]

Bullshit. Google's Go directly competes with python on the web server side. Javascript is directly competing with Python for server apps now too.

No, they target completely different stuff.

[litfan]

No, they target completely different stuff.

Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day it'll be true.

[tuubi]

You're the clueless one if you think Python has any chance int he next 5 years to remain relevant.

Heh, not a day goes by without someone loudly proclaiming from the peanut gallery that this programming language or that operating system will be dead/irrelevant in a few years. I doubt this is true in Python's case either.

Personally I don't see myself rewriting our perfectly working python server code just because it might not be the coolest thing or the latest fad around just now. And it doesn't seem I'll have any reason to in the coming years either, especially to replace it all with a less elegant language like javascript. I work with both and I don't see any good reason to use js outside of client side web scripting. Maybe the high availability of proficient javascript developers is a factor in big corporations?