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

Back in 2014 Dropbox announced the Pyston project as an open-source JIT compiler to Python focusing upon maximum performance. With this newest Pyston release (v0.6.1) they are now 95% faster than CPython, but Dropbox is ending their involvement in the project.

Pyston will remain open-source, but this is the last release Dropbox is sponsoring and their involved developers are moving on to other projects.

Dropbox is ending their sponsorship of Pyston due to moving performance-sensitive code to other languages (they mention Go) and they spent a lot more time working on code compatibility and memory usage than anticipated. They are ending their work being 95% faster with standard Python benchmarks, on web-workload benchmarks they are 48% faster. With Dropbox's server they are 10% faster over CPython.

The Dropbox developers who led Pyston are now trying to figure out next steps, including hopefully letting the project live-on in whole or part. They are also hoping CPython will accept some of their code.

More details via this blog post.