Live data from Hacker News

Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

github.com

31–40 of 181 posts

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#31
post #25
post #19

Odd how you still see announcements of this nature if Anthropic's marketing is be believed.

Most maintainers don't have a stack of cash to throw at tokens.

They don’t need to throw a stack of cash at them, Anthropic and OpenAI have programs for open source maintainers.

https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#33

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]. [0]: https://github.com/orgs/pypy/discussions/5145

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.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#34
post #30
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being three major versions behind CPython is definitely not a great sign for the long-term viability of it.

I'm not sure "major versions" is the most correct term here, but I think your point is spot on

For Python, 0.1 increases are major versions and 1.0 increases are cataclysmic shifts.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#35
post #31
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most maintainers don't have a stack of cash to throw at tokens.

They don’t need to throw a stack of cash at them, Anthropic and OpenAI have programs for open source maintainers. https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss https://openai.com/form/codex-for-oss/

I'd say they're less of "programs" as they are "six-month trials". What's the plan after six months?

And for what's it worth, PyPy isn't even eligible for the Claude trial because they have a meager 1700 stars on GitHub.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#36
post #2

Somewhat interesting that "volunteer project no longer under active development" got changed to "unmaintained".

much respect to the PyPy contributors, but it seems like a pretty fair assessment

9 months since the last major release definitely feels like a short time in which to declare time-of-death on an open source project

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#38
post #26

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 produc…

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.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

much respect to the PyPy contributors, but it seems like a pretty fair assessment

9 months since the last major release definitely feels like a short time in which to declare time-of-death on an open source project

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.
Post reply on HN