I use it to speed up NEAT-Python for simulations
Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
171–180 of 185 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#172Yes. We have a legacy Python-based geospatial data processing pipeline. Switching from CPython to PyPy sped it up by a factor of 30x or so, which was extremely helpful. Thank you for your amazing work!
Would love to hear more. Is it still being used?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#173I use it to speed up NEAT-Python for simulations
What kind of speed up do you get?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#174When I worked at Transit App, I built a backend pre-processing pipeline to compress transit and osm data in python [1] and also another pipeline to process transit map data in python [2]. Since the Ops people complained about how long it took to compress the transit feeds (I think London took 10h each time something changed), I migrated everything to Pypy. Back then that was a bit annoying cuz it meant I had to remov…
What kind of speed up did you get?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#175Copying from an older comment of mine shilling Pypy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25595590 PyPy is pretty well stress-tested by the competitive programming community. https://codeforces.com/contests has around 20-30k participants per contest, with contests happening roughly twice a week. I would say around 10% of them use python, with the vast majority choosing pypy over cpython. I would guesstimate at least 1…
Really cool!
Competitive Programming needs a lot of speed to compete with the C++ submissions, really cool that there are Contestants using Python to win.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#176When I worked at Transit App, I built a backend pre-processing pipeline to compress transit and osm data in python [1] and also another pipeline to process transit map data in python [2]. Since the Ops people complained about how long it took to compress the transit feeds (I think London took 10h each time something changed), I migrated everything to Pypy. Back then that was a bit annoying cuz it meant I had to remov…
What kind of speed up did you get?
Some parts 10x and more. Overall a bit more than 5x.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#177Hi Matti. I'm happy to see that you're doing community outreach. I haven't tried PyPy in a while. The general impression I have about PyPy is that as soon as you try to do anything a little bit complicated, things break in unexpected ways and there's little support. Also, I love using Wing IDE for debugging, and if I'm not mistaken it can't debug PyPy code. I'm currently doing multi-agent reinforcement learning resea…
Wow, I didn't know anyone still uses Wing. The modern debugging tools available in other IDEs work fine with PyPy (and have for years), so I guess that must be a wing issue.
Interesting, thank you. I think a big part of PyPy's problem is the long tail of esoteric tools and packages that different people use.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian is its own worst enemy with things like this. It’s why we eventually moved off it at a previous job, because deploying Python server applications on it was dreadful. I’m sure it’s better if you’re deploying an appliance that you hand off and never touch again, but for evolving modern Python servers it’s not well suited.
What distro did you move to? IME debian as a base image for python app containers is also kind of a pain.
We moved to stripped down Debian images in containers and made sure to not use any of the Debian packaging ecosystem.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Debian is its own worst enemy with things like this. It’s why we eventually moved off it at a previous job, because deploying Python server applications on it was dreadful. I’m sure it’s better if you’re deploying an appliance that you hand off and never touch again, but for evolving modern Python servers it’s not well suited.
It works completely fine in my experience.
Lucky you. Having gone through multiple Debian upgrades, a Python 2->3 migration on Debian, and Debian python packaging to Pip/PyPI, it was a whole world of pain that cost us months of development time over years, as well as a substantial amount of downtime.