https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Shannon_(actor)
That mark shannon:
https://github.com/markshannon
He tried to do hotpy in 2011, and trigger the idea of FAT byte code which I believed inspired the FAT python attempt of Victor Stinner.
Now stinner is working on Hpy, dropbox on pyston, instagram on cinder, and pyjion just got a release.
Looks like Python is going to get faster one way or another.
It is always announcements, talks, conferences and if something emerges it is a bit weird like the pattern matching.
Meanwhile the Erlang people quietly produced a JIT without any advertisements.
Because almost everything you've seen as 'working code' started its life as an announcement.
And because to coordinate and discuss future work, there would need to be some announcements.
And because some announcements (based on the persons, e.g. here GvR is involved) or the funding (e.g. here MS is involved) or the specificity (e.g. here 3.10 timeframe is discussed) are more important than others.
>Meanwhile the Erlang people quietly produced a JIT without any advertisements.
Good for them. That's maybe because much fewer care for Erlang (and thus for the advertisements) related to Python (which has a much larger dev base), so the advertisements of the former are posted fewer times and discussed by fewer people.
Not only is it a large user base, but a varied one too. Flask, Django, FastAPI, Twisted...and that is just to name the web frameworks! We have scientific use, research use, cli tools. Perhaps in some cases end users (developers or not) of those tools may not be aware Python is the foundation of said tool.
Anecdotally the Erlang users I've met have been incredibly knowledgeable and in tune with the language features and development. I find that pretty cool.
In my opinion, an argument can be made that Elixir is the most prominent web framework for the language, so developers can just keep up with that and not the language if they wish. Compared to the Python ecosystem. As Erlang inevitably grows in popularity, it too may fragment.
Er, no, they didn’t, they made plenty of announcements before the release, most of which even made their way to HN.
When you like a tech, knowing people are brewing improved perfs on it is kinky. On Python, the motto has always been "it's fast enough", "if you want perfs, don't use python", "C extensions will solve this", "we don't want to make the main implementation complicated", "python dynamism and GIL make it a hard problem", etc.
So in the python world, it's particularly big news, especially given that previous attempts (gilectomy, unladen swallow, first pyston...) all died.
This is precisely the point you seem to be missing. All those things you mentioned were similar big announcements back in their day, and they all have just died by fizzling. What should be setting this one apart?
Also, most of them released working code.
So I guess we shouldn’t be excited about that, either.
I think they could get away with it for a while because none of the competing implementation would readily steal Python’s darlings, namely NumPy/SciPy and Tensorflow. Now there is competition, and it can really push CPython away to being a niche “reference implementation”, thus we are seeing these twitches.
The track record of CPython core team in the last decade makes me very wary when it comes to bringing in such features. Ship it or it didn’t happen.
P. S. Microsoft once threw a large sum of money at Kenneth Reitz to work on Requests, anyone remembers how that story ended?
However, the first release will probably suck like asyncio or type hints did.
It will take time to become usable, but it's unlikely it won't happen.
Namely, that it’s absolutely not guaranteed to work.
Mypy was Jukka Lehtosalo's work, asyncio was fixed and extended by many.
So now he needs a project at Microsoft, he changed his mind (or had it changed under pressure) and this is the project. We'll see, I agree though that the first version will be underwhelming, the following versions will have a max speedup of 50% but will be celebrated at conferences and here.
If that is cause for excitement can be seen when a product is finished.
In a way, it seems like Mark Shannon found someone to take him up on his offer on a plan for speeding up Python.