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Python JIT project was asked to pause development

discuss.python.org

21–30 of 105 posts

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#21

Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.

The JIT project already lost a lot of momentum when the people working on it lost their jobs (at Microsoft)..

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#22
post #4
post #2

> For that reason, the Steering Council is formally requesting a Standards Track PEP be authored that the community can discuss and the Steering Council can formally accept (or reject), making the case for the JIT as a supported, non-experimental part of CPython: its guarantees, its maintenance commitments, and its impact on redistributors. I didn't notice the current PEP was a provisional one. Hope the new one gets…

>The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. Thank You. As someone who don't follow python closely I thought their JIT would be similar to what Ruby has. Not that Ruby YJIT or ZJIT is anywhere close to what JVM provides, but in this case it seems to be quite far ahead of Python. Which is surprising given how many major companies are…

Python software is to a large extent either doing things in not-python (c, c++, rust, etc.) or doing things that are not cpu bound (io bound, async, etc.). If you're cpu bound then you can either take a 2x jit improvement or take a 10x non-python improvement. There's few companies of a scale where the non-hot path cost of 2x cpu is so massive as to be worth caring about.

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#23
post #2

> For that reason, the Steering Council is formally requesting a Standards Track PEP be authored that the community can discuss and the Steering Council can formally accept (or reject), making the case for the JIT as a supported, non-experimental part of CPython: its guarantees, its maintenance commitments, and its impact on redistributors. I didn't notice the current PEP was a provisional one. Hope the new one gets…

Kind of a shit move to suddenly pull the rug once they've finally gotten it working. Should have been kept out of main from the start.

The post clearly says the intention is to get a formal spec for formal integration.

To leave their experimental phase they have to define some goals to meet and that requires making some architectural choices that still aren't decided.

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#25

Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.

They're not being asked to halt development, they're being asked to halt landing new features on the cPython main branch.

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#26
>> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well.

lol

>> For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies.

poison-pill requirement

>> We are setting a window of six months for a PEP to be submitted and resolved. If no such PEP is accepted within that window, the JIT code must be removed from the main branch

so it's going to be removed from the main branch

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#28
post #24

"Asked to pause development" isn't entirely accurate: they were asked to pause landing new features (as opposed to bug fixes) on the cPython main branch.

... and only until the whole thing can be fully formalized with an approved PEP. I'm no Python insider, but that doesn't sound horribly controversial to me.

And yet, I have a hunch it will piss off a lot of people nonetheless and lead to much outrage and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hopefully it all works out in the long run.

Re: Python JIT project was asked to pause development

#30
post #8

> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. If I were a contributor I would read such language as saying "we have no respect for you or your intelligence, so we'll just straight up gaslight you and expect you to accept it." The dictum can't be read literally - it has to be read like the manipulative, narcissist-spe…

"it has to be read like the manipulative, narcissist-speak that it is"

That's a very strong claim. I'm not seeing that at all. What causes you to interpret it that way?

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