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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

tonybaloney.github.io

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Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#21

Post by CJefferson »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

A big part of what made Python so successful was how easy it was to extend with C modules. It turns out to be very hard to JIT Python without breaking these, and most people don’t want a Python that doesn’t support C extension modules.

The JavaScript VMs often break their extensions APIs for speed, but their users are more used to this.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#23

Post by AndrewDucker »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

Always interested in replies to this kind of comment, which basically boil down to "Python is so slow that we have to write any important code in C. And this is somehow a good thing."

I mean, it's great that you can write some of your code in C. But wouldn't it be great if you could just write your libraries in Python and have them still be really fast?

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#24

Post by yellowstuff »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

There have been several attempts. For example, Google tried to introduce a JIT in 2011 with a project named Unladen Swallow, but that ended up getting abandoned.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#25

Post by [deleted] »

epcoa wrote: post #20
wrd83 wrote: post #17

Honestly I don't understand the pessimistic view here. I think every release since Microsoft started funding python has increased high single digit best case performance. Rather than focussing on the raw number compare to python 3.5 or so. It's still getting significantly faster. If they keep doing this steady pace they are slowly saving the planet!

Sorry, but reality bites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

[deleted]

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#26

Post by dagw »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

There are a lot of faster python runtimes out there. Both Google and Instagram/Meta have done a lot of work on this, mostly to solve internal problems they've been having with python performance. Microsoft has also done work on parallel python. There's PyPy and Pythran and no doubt several others. However none of these attempts have managed to be 100% compatible with the current CPython (and more importantly the CPython C API), so they haven't been considered as replacements.

JavaScript had the huge advantage that there was very little mission critical legacy JavaScript code around they had to take into consideration, and no C libraries that they had to stay compatible with. Meaning that modern JavaScript runtime teams could more or less start from scratch. Also the JavaScript world at the time were a lot more OK with different JavaScript runtimes not being 100% compatible with each other. If you 'just' want a faster python runtime that supports most of python and many existing libraries, but are OK with having to rewrite some your existing python code or third party libraries to make it work on that runtime, then there are several to choose from.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#27

Post by pjmlp »

Finally!

Regardless of the work being done in PyPy, Jython, GraalPy and IronPython, having a JIT in CPython seems to be the only way beyond "C/C++/Fortran libs are Python" mindset.

Looking forward to its evolution, from 3.13 onwards.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#28

Post by albertzeyer »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

In lots of applications, all the computations already happen inside native libraries, e.g. Numpy, PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX etc.

And if you have a complicate computation graph, there are already JITs on this level, based on Python code, e.g. see torch.compile, or TF XLA (done by default via tf.function), JAX, etc.

It's also important to do JIT on this level, to really be able to fuse CUDA ops, etc. A generic Python JIT probably cannot really do this, as this is CUDA specific, or TPU specific, etc.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#29

Post by pansa2 »

yellowstuff wrote: post #24
cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

There have been several attempts. For example, Google tried to introduce a JIT in 2011 with a project named Unladen Swallow, but that ended up getting abandoned.

Unladen Swallow was massively over-hyped. It was talked about as though Google had a large team writing “V8 for Python”, but IIRC it was really just an internship project.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#30

Post by el_oni »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

I think the thing with python is that it's always been "fast enough" and if not you can always reach out to natively implemented modules. On the flipside javascript was the main language embedded in web browsers.

There has been a lot of competition to make browsers fast. Nowadays there are 3 main JS engines, V8 backed by google, JavaScriptCore backed by apple, and spidermonkey backed by mozilla.

If python had been the language embedded into web browsers, then maybe we would see 3 competing python engines with crazy performance.

The alternative interpreters for python have always been a bit more niche than Cpython, but now that Guido works at microsoft there has been a bit more of a push to make it faster

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