Pyston Now 95% Faster Than CPython, But Dropbox Just Stopped Supporting It

[coder111]

Could someone give me a summary of Pyston vs PyPy? Both offer performance improvements over CPython. Where's the catch?

How do they work with compatibility to CPython extensions and other libraries?

[caligula]

Seems from the FAQ that Pyston was only for Python 2 anyway.

Anything that still tries to build on Python 2 is a waste of time.

Almost 50% of packages in a desktop distro depend on Python 2 (vs 3). Many people think that Python 3 is seriously flawed. E.g. parentheses with print -> broken.

[cj.wijtmans]

Almost 50% of packages in a desktop distro depend on Python 2 (vs 3). Many people think that Python 3 is seriously flawed. E.g. parentheses with print -> broken.

most support python3 already. only a few packages here and there left. certbot is still on python2 i think.

[cj.wijtmans]

is Go really that much better?

[stephen82]

I am under the impression that they are changing their architecture, since they got out of the cloud to o premisse servers and in this new phase the are changing things and using new tools, when this make sense. When dropbox started python was pretty much the only game in town.

Oh the irony today...I have just read an amazing article posted on Hacker News and this project outperforms Node.js and Go, by orders of multi-magnitude...HA!

Here it is https://github.com/squeaky-pl/japronto

[kenjitamura]

is Go really that much better?

On scaling workloads like web server deployment Go blows Python away. This announcement from Dropbox comes awfully fast after Google announced its Grumpy project. Looks like I was right on the money when I guessed lots of companies still working with Python 2 would prefer to port the Python 2 base to Go and reap the benefits over moving on to Python 3 just to keep being supported.

[kpedersen]

Darn trendy language hoppers. Should have just picked C and been done with it. Then they could be working on cooler things by now

[microcode]

Darn trendy language hoppers. Should have just picked C and been done with it. Then they could be working on cooler things by now

I've been thinking this about almost every piece of software I've seen in the last three years of work. C has problems, but C's problems are largely solved. Other languages maybe have fewer problems, but many of them are unsolved.

[Nelson]

I've been thinking this about almost every piece of software I've seen in the last three years of work. C has problems, but C's problems are largely solved. Other languages maybe have fewer problems, but many of them are unsolved.

Solved? You mean like memory leaks are just fixed now? Or errno vs, overloading a return value to indicate an error? And intermediate level developers never return stack values in function results, the compilers fixed that? No more buffer overflows? C's problems are the very nature of C, you can't "solve" them. Dropbox would probably have never been if they used C.

This is kind of interesting event, they built their own compiler to speed things up, it makes benchmarks run twice as quick and it makes their workload only 10% faster. I doubt they needed to build a compiler to know it, but they have an architecture problem. They're going to rebuild a lot of stuff no matter what they do if they choose to address it. Switching to Go seems like a very sane and rational thing to do. It's much safer than C, it performs in that Java to C level, it's popular and people are writing it with a quickness. There is probably a culture within the company that makes discussing such architectural flaws difficult. Plus, customers aren't complaining about performance, it's a margin issue which just suggests what everyone already knows, dropbox is getting close to a liquidity event and they think they can make it spectacular if they pick up a few points on ops expenses..

[stephen82]

On scaling workloads like web server deployment Go blows Python away. This announcement from Dropbox comes awfully fast after Google announced its Grumpy project. Looks like I was right on the money when I guessed lots of companies still working with Python 2 would prefer to port the Python 2 base to Go and reap the benefits over moving on to Python 3 just to keep being supported.

It seems I'm not the only one who thinks this way mate. I wrote about grumpy before you said anything and your worry validates my own concern. It was the first thing that came in my mind when I read about their decision.

I guess we can see things the way it should.

Well done mate