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Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

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Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#151

Post by westurner »

QQ00 wrote: post #32
_zagj wrote: post #19

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

Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work, how their LLM can help in maintaining PyPy?

Prompts for this?

The primary objective is to retarget PyPy on top of the Python main branch. A minor objective is to document what of PyPy can be ported to CPython (or RustPython).

Keep a markdown log of issues in order to cluster and close when fixed

Clone PyPy and CPython.

Review the PyPy codebase and docs.

Prepare a devcontainer.json for PyPy to more safely contain coding LLMs and simplify development

Review the backlog of PyPy issues.

Review the CPython whatsnew docs for each version of python (since and including 3.11).

What has changed in CPython since 3.11 which affects PyPy?

Study the differences between PyPy code and CPython code to understand how to optimize like PyPy.

Prepare an AGENTS.md for PyPy.

Prepare an agent skill for upgrading PyPy with these and other methods.

Write tests to verify that everything in PyPy works after updating it to be compatible with the Python main branch (or the latest stable release, CPython 3.14)

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#152

Post by vector_spaces »

throwaway27448 wrote: post #143
blahgeek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Cython vs CPython

What is cpython? I don't think I've heard of this one before. Edit: it's just python. People are pretending like other attempts to implement this are on equal footing

PyPy is a JIT-compiled implementation of a language called RPython which is a restricted subset of Python. It does not and has never attempted to implement Python or replace your CPython interpreter for most intents and purposes. CPython is the official reference implementation of the Python language and what you probably use if you write Python code and don't understand the difference between a programming language and its implementations (which is fine)

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#153

Post by saila »

vector_spaces wrote: post #152
throwaway27448 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is cpython? I don't think I've heard of this one before. Edit: it's just python. People are pretending like other attempts to implement this are on equal footing

PyPy is a JIT-compiled implementation of a language called RPython which is a restricted subset of Python. It does not and has never attempted to implement Python or replace your CPython interpreter for most intents and purposes. CPython is the official reference implementation of the Python language and what you probably use if you write Python code and don't understand the difference between a programming language…

This doesn't sound right. PyPy has always been described as an alternative implementation of Python that could in some cases be a drop-in replacement for CPython (AKA standard Python) that could speed up production workloads. Underneath that is the RPython toolchain, but that's not what most people are talking about when they talk about PyPy.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#155

Post by em-bee »

itishappy wrote: post #146
throwaway27448 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is cpython? I don't think I've heard of this one before. Edit: it's just python. People are pretending like other attempts to implement this are on equal footing

CPython (the compiler) is the most popular implementation of Python (the language) like GCC, Clang, and MSVC (compilers) are implementations of C (the language). Other Python implementations include PyPy, Jython, and IronPython. Nobody is "pretending" anything. These have all been around for 15+ years at this point. Your ignorance does not imply intent to deceive on others part.

saying the most popular hides the actual reason why it is popular though. it is the original python implementation. it defines the standard and functions a reference for all others. for better or for worse other implementations have to be bug-compatible with it, and that is what puts them not on equal footing.

for C compilers no reference implementation exists. the C standard was created out of multiple existing implementations.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#156

Post by jjgreen »

mattip wrote: post #38
pansa2 wrote: 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, a…

I rather like Python and have used the C API extensively, "nice" is not the word I'd choose ...

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#157

Post by cozzyd »

lmeyerov wrote: post #138
SiempreViernes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is silly, there's no killer feature for scientific computing being added to python that would make an existing pypy codebase drop that dependency, getting a code validated takes a long time and dropping something like pypy will require re-valditating the entire thing.

The phenomena you're describing is why Cobol programmers still exist, and simultaneously, why it's increasingly irrelevant to most programmers The killer feature is ecosystem: Easily and reliably reusing other libraries and tools that work out-of-the-box with other Python code written in the last few years . There are individually neato features motivating the efforts involved in upgrading a widely-used language & en…

The alternative is when you run a script that you last used a few years ago and now need it again for some reason (very common in research) and you might end up spending way too much time making it work with your now upgraded stack.

Sure you can were you should have pinned dependencies but that's a lot of overhead for a random script...

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#158

Post by pjmlp »

mattip wrote: post #38
pansa2 wrote: 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, a…

Python was already widely deployed before them, thanks to Zope, and being a saner alternative to Perl.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#159

Post by cozzyd »

ajross wrote: post #140
cfbolztereick wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timely management of external resources is what the `with` statement has been for since 2006, added in python 2.5 or so. To debug these problems Python has Resource Warnings. Additionally, CPython's gc is also only eager in a best effort kind of way. If cycles are involved it can take long to release memory. This will become even more the case in future versions of CPython, in the free threading variants.

Sorry, the with statement is non-responsive. The question isn't whether you "can" write PyPy-friendly code. Obviously you can. The question isn't even whether or not you "should" write PyPy-friendly code, it's whether YOU DID , or your predecessors did. And the answer is "No, they didn't". I mean, duh, as it were. PyPy isn't compatible. In this way and a thousand tiny others. It's not really "Python" in a measurable…

I've run into similar resource limit exhaustion due to the GC not keeping issues with cpython as well
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