PyPy core dev here. If anyone is interested in helping out, either financially or with coding, we can be reached various ways. See https://pypy.org/contact.html
PyPy is a fantastic achievement and deserves far more support than it gets. Microsoft’s “Faster CPython” team tried to make Python 5x faster but only achieved ~1.5x in four years - meanwhile PyPy has been running at over 5x faster for decades.
On the other hand, I always got the impression that the main goal of PyPy is to be a research project (on meta-tracing, STM etc) rather than a replacement for CPython in production.
Maybe that, plus the core Python team’s indifference towards non-CPython implementations, is why it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
Third party libraries like SciPy scikit-learn, pandas, tensorflow and pytorch have been critical to python’s success. Since CPython is written in C and exposes a nice C API, those libraries can leverage it to quickly move from (slow) python to (fast) C/C++, hitting an optimum between speed of development and speed of runtime.
PyPy’s alternative, CFFI, was not attractive enough for the big players to adopt. And HPy, another alternative that would have played better with Cython and friends came too late in the game, by that time PyPy development had lost momentum.
If anyone else is also barely aware and confused by the similar names, PyPI is the Python Package Index, which is up and maintained. PyPy is "A fast, compliant alternative implementation of Python." which doesn't have enough devs to release a version for 3.12[0].
Thanks for the clarification. On top of that, being an issue in the 'uv' GitHub repo (uv installs packages from PyPi) made my brain easily cross the letters.
PyPy isn't unmaintained. We are certainly fixing bugs and are occasionally improving the jit. However, the remaining core devs (me among them) don't have the capacity to keep up with cpython. So for supporting new cpython versions we'll need new people to step up. For 3.12 this has started, we have a new contributor who is pushing this along.
There's a difference between dead (i.e. "unmaintained") and low activity ("not under active development"). From what I can see PyPy is in the latter category (and being in that category does not mean it's going to die soon), so choosing to claim it is unmaintained is notable.
It’s been a lot longer than that. There was a reasonable sized effort to provide binaries via conda-forge but the users never came. That said, the PyPy devs were always a pleasure to work with.
I really like PyPy’s approach of using a Python dialect (RPython) as the implementation language, instead of C. From a conceptual perspective, it is much more elegant. And there are other C-like Python dialects now too - Cython, mypy’s mypyc. It would be a shame if PyPy dies.
knowing pypy has good implementations of a lot of behavior it helped me fix multiprocessing in Maya's python interpreter, fixing stuff like torch running inside of Maya.
it's too bad. it is a great project for a million little use cases.
For me the biggest signifier is Spotify. They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore, they use an internal AI tool that they just send prompts to which then checks out a personal test build that they can download off of Slack. "A new feature in 10 minutes!"
Okay, if that is the case, why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements in Spotify the last ~12 months, with no new grand features? And why haven't they fired 95% of their devs and let the remaining elite go buckwild with Claude?
@kvinogradov (Open source endowment), I am (Pinging?) you because I think that you may be of help as I remember you stating that within the Open source endowment and the approach of how & which open source projects are better funded[0]
And I think that PyPy might be of interest to the Fund for sponsoring given its close to unmaintained. PyPy is really great in general speeding up Python[1] by magnitudes of order.
Maybe the fund could be of help in order to help paying the maintainer who are underfunded which lead to the situation being unmaintained in the first place. Pinging you because I am interested to hear your response and hopefully, see PyPy having better funding model for its underfunded maintainers.
> @kvinogradov (Open source endowment), I am (Pinging?) you
unfortunately, @-pinging does not work on this site, it does nothing to notify anyone. If you want to get a specific person’s attention, use off-site communication mechanisms
What annoys me is the name. Early morning it took me a
moment to realise that PyPy is not PyPi, so at first I
thought they referred to PyPi. Really, just for the name
confusion alone, one of those two should have to go.
Edit: I understand the underlying issue and the PyPy developer's opinion. I don't disagree on that part; I only refer to the name similarity as a problem.
On the other hand, I always got the impression that the main goal of PyPy is to be a research project (on meta-tracing, STM etc) rather than a replacement for CPython in production.
Maybe that, plus the core Python team’s indifference towards non-CPython implementations, is why it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.
PyPy’s alternative, CFFI, was not attractive enough for the big players to adopt. And HPy, another alternative that would have played better with Cython and friends came too late in the game, by that time PyPy development had lost momentum.
[0]: https://github.com/orgs/pypy/discussions/5145
[1]: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commits/main/
[2]: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/tags
it's too bad. it is a great project for a million little use cases.
For me the biggest signifier is Spotify. They claim their (best) devs don't even code anymore, they use an internal AI tool that they just send prompts to which then checks out a personal test build that they can download off of Slack. "A new feature in 10 minutes!"
Okay, if that is the case, why have we only seen like 3-4 minor new QoL improvements in Spotify the last ~12 months, with no new grand features? And why haven't they fired 95% of their devs and let the remaining elite go buckwild with Claude?
The Emperor really has no clothes.
https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/
And what's it worth, PyPy isn't even eligible for the Claude trial because they have a meager 1700 stars on GitHub.
And I think that PyPy might be of interest to the Fund for sponsoring given its close to unmaintained. PyPy is really great in general speeding up Python[1] by magnitudes of order.
Maybe the fund could be of help in order to help paying the maintainer who are underfunded which lead to the situation being unmaintained in the first place. Pinging you because I am interested to hear your response and hopefully, see PyPy having better funding model for its underfunded maintainers.
[0]: https://endowment.dev/about/#model
[1]: https://benjdd.com/languages2/ (Refer to PyPY and Python difference being ~15x)
unfortunately, @-pinging does not work on this site, it does nothing to notify anyone. If you want to get a specific person’s attention, use off-site communication mechanisms
Edit: I understand the underlying issue and the PyPy developer's opinion. I don't disagree on that part; I only refer to the name similarity as a problem.