William Stein wrote: > Why should a a few guys who read some papers be able to massively beat > (a factor of 5!?) the work of the entire Python development community > over 15 years? I certainly didn't see anything to convince me that > they can pull that off.
Those were my doubts, too. It's a project that was started without even involving the core CPython developers. But they seem to be good in marketing. ;) I know that technical revolutions are possible, but I also know that "removing the GIL and ref-counting" has serious implications that will necessarily break things, especially for extension modules. > I'm certainly not saying they won't or > can't. In fact, I really hope they do since it would benefit us all. > It's just that with Python every few months it seems like another > project pops up with the goal to speed up Python by a factor of 5-10, > and they fall by the wayside after a few years... except Cython, which > actually succeeds. Cython is far from giving you a factor of 5 for 'normal' Python code, i.e. without any type annotations, but it can give you a factor of 100 and more if you get things right. We know that there is quite some potential in type inference, but you have to do a lot more program analysis than we have today to really know when you can safely move things into C space (and how). I think the main reason why Cython works so well is that it can improve gradually. Everything that it doesn't generate nicely looking code for is a bug, and it just gets better every day. Removing GIL and ref-counting from CPython is a major project that it's not that satisfying to do 10% of. Stefan _______________________________________________ Cython-dev mailing list [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/cython-dev
