Modifying the Python object model
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#2Great article worth reading for any hardcore Python fans.
I’d also add that the comments on the LWN article are good too.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#3I would love to see python get much faster. Seeing all the work on node and V8 has made me jealous to the point of wondering if someone would ever take the Python syntax and just put it on top of V8 or (preferably) LLVM.
Yeah, I know that’s more work that I can imagine, but I can dream, right?
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#4Strange that Guido or the other CPython devs would object to adding caching (though, rereading, maybe they only objected to the tone it was presented in - which still seems a bit sensitive). I get favoring simple code over optimizations for more extreme cases like switching from dictionaries to arrays, but what essentially sounds like a tiny LRU cache for method dispatch seems like a clear win for everyone.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#5I would love to see python get much faster. Seeing all the work on node and V8 has made me jealous to the point of wondering if someone would ever take the Python syntax and just put it on top of V8 or (preferably) LLVM. Yeah, I know that’s more work that I can imagine, but I can dream, right?
The development of V8 was paid for by Google, and at that point they wanted to achieve market dominance against other big players.
It seems nobody is willing to put big enough money behind making Python much faster. My view is that the limitations are almost purely financial (as in, paying heavily somebody as skillful as e.g. Mike Pall or Lars Bak(1) and his team), not technical.
If Guido would not accept the "faster" Python, the fork would still be more popular if it would be compatible enough. And there are the technical aspects: it's not enough to make Python interpreter alone faster, whoever would take that challenge would have to adapt various important external libraries to be really accepted. Which is AFAIK also doable.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Bak_(computer_programmer)
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#6Great article worth reading for any hardcore Python fans. I’d also add that the comments on the LWN article are good too.
LWN.net articles are generally quite good. I signed up after reading an excellent summary of Spectre/Meltdown work from Greg Kroah-Hartmann.
@all if you like this article please pay for a subscription. LWN.net deserves our support.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#7I know some of the words in that article.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#8It's maybe worth noting that richards is an "easy" benchmark. PyPy has been speeding it up quite significantly by about 40x for a long time.
Those changes are necessary for improved performance, but not nearly good enough. PyPy does that and tons and tons of more stuff and it gets dismissed here as "provided only modest speedup on company workload", which means there is far more involved here than just attribute lookup/function call which have been massively speed up by pypy for quite a few years now.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#9I would love to see python get much faster. Seeing all the work on node and V8 has made me jealous to the point of wondering if someone would ever take the Python syntax and just put it on top of V8 or (preferably) LLVM. Yeah, I know that’s more work that I can imagine, but I can dream, right?
The development of V8 was paid for by Google, and at that point they wanted to achieve market dominance against other big players. It seems nobody is willing to put big enough money behind making Python much faster. My view is that the limitations are almost purely financial (as in, paying heavily somebody as skillful as e.g. Mike Pall or Lars Bak(1) and his team), not technical. If Guido would not accept the "faster…
The barriers are nearly purely social - the unwillingness to drop C API (or to have a phase out plan) and to declare certain kinds of behaviors as "implementation dependent" make it very hard for any meaningful competition to emerge.
It is harder to make a fast python than to make a fast JS, but it's not that much harder.
Re: Modifying the Python object model
#10I'm surprised the article left out mention of PyPy, which is pretty comparable to something like V8