I'm personally very excited about the prospects for NumPy in PyPy, as this is my main use case for python.
Relatedly, on the PyPy homepage, you can give money to help grease the wheels on development of specific PyPy features: http://pypy.org/. There's also quite detailed proposals that describe where the money will go, how it will help each feature's development, why each feature is useful/cool, etc. To me this seems like a really awesome way to organize donations for an open source project and gives me greater confidence that my donation will have an impact.
Wow, this is a very exciting moment for the Python world.
And they didn't even reached their funding goal for "py3k in pypy" [1]. This is dedication. I encourage everyone to fund this extremely incredible project!
Thanks for the sentiment. We are major sponsors of PyCon and have donated to PyPy.
What I'm trying to suggest is that the amount they've received to support Python 3 ($250,000 from Mozilla, $66,677 in public donations) is signal that there is major demand for this.
Could they use the infra that is building binaries for PyPy2 for PyPy3?
I understand where they are coming from "Existing project are using Python2" but I'd like to see them focus more on the future.
I love what PyPy is doing and I want them to succeed but I can't imagine their success coming out of Python2. I see them more competing with more modern performant languages that are currently stealing from Python (i.e Go/Rust).
If they focused on the future they could directly compete in that market of projects that are rewriting in other languages for performance.
We spent the py3k budget (almost all of it) on delivering pypy 3.2. If someone is very unhappy that it was either too expensive or we didn't deliver enough for the money we received, I can apologize.
I wish that Google, Dropbox and Instagram would invest some of this money in Pypy as well - which has been struggling for funds for quite a while.
In fact, I have nothing but the deepest of respect for the Devs who built a version of python better than the "officially sanctioned one" without having any financial support.
That isn't a fair complaint to levy on the PyPy developers.
We are one of those paying customers (on occasion), for instance, and there is no benefit for us for work on PyPy 3 and potential large benefit from some of the upcoming work on PyPy 2. If people see benefit from PyPy 3 they should donate to motivate work on it.
PyPy is being update very regularly with 3 releases a year on average. Most of the work however focuses on things our users really want - stability, performance, C extension support, warmup speed, memory consumption - you know the mundane stuff. If someone is willing to put effort into supporting more python 3, that's great! we would welcome the contributions.
PS. We're closing onto 3.3 release soon
PPS. Google donated a bit of money to PyPy when Guido was there, definitely "google supporting pypy" is a bit of a stretch. It was years ago though
I actually donated to the Pypy project in the past but I don’t use it.
Two reasons for my hesitation:
1) Cpython is fast enough for most things I need to do. The speed improvement from Pypy is either not enough or not necessary.
2) Lingering doubts about subtle incompatibility (in terms of library support) that I might have to spend hours getting to the bottom of.
I already work long hours and don’t have bandwidth to tinker. With Cpython, although slow, I can be assured is the standard surface that everyone targets, and I can google solutions for.
It’s the subtle things that i waste a lot of time on. It’s analogous to an Ubuntu user trying to use Red Hat. They’re both Linuxes but the way things are done are different enough that they trip you up.
The only way to get out of this quandary is for Pypy to be a first class citizen. Guido will never endorse this so this means a bunch of us will always have hesitation putting it into production systems.
Yeah, we need to put our money where our mouth is. Frankly I'm amazed how far PyPy has gotten with the few resources it has. Even their toolchain is amazing; other people are starting to use it to build JITs for other languages.
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