Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 181 posts

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#171

Post by swiftcoder »

crote wrote: post #107
masklinn wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is also lagging behind in terms of Python releases. Which it has always been, especially since Python 3, as anyone who's followed the pypy project in the last decade years is well aware.

The problem is that it is lagging behind enough that it is falling out of the support window for a lot of libraries. Imagine someone releases RustPy tomorrow, which supports Python 2.7. Is it maintained? Technically, yes - it is just lagging behind a few releases. Should tooling give a big fat warning about it being essentially unusable if you try to use it with the 2026 Python ecosystem? Also yes.

3.11 still has 2 years of active security patches, and has most of the modern python ecosystem on tap. That is a whole different ballgame than stuff stuck in the pre-split 2.x world

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#172

Post by stuaxo »

IanCal wrote: post #86
stuaxo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website should have a prominent Donate section, maybe have some tiers of donation like the Ladybird browser does. I wanted to put a little £ towards the project but couldn't see a place to do it.

I don’t disagree about prominence but to share the links under the about section for people here https://pypy.org/howtohelp.html https://opencollective.com/pypy

Thanks, I should add PyPy to the list of projects I send a little to ... PyPy should be better supported by organisations + not need individual contributions, but things are where they are I guess.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#173

Post by OJFord »

saghm wrote: post #168
OJFord wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are de facto semantic major versions - think of recent-ish additions like f-strings and match-case (3.7 and 3.11, I think), you'd get a syntax error in an older parser. PyPy targeting 3.9 for example would would support f-strings but not match-case. Or at runtime, you can import things from the standard library which require a minimum 3.x. - .x releases frequently if not always add things, or even change an exis…

> They are de facto semantic major versions - think of recent-ish additions like f-strings and match-case (3.7 and 3.11, I think), you'd get a syntax error in an older parser. PyPy targeting 3.9 for example would would support f-strings but not match-case. Are you saying that you'd get an error using the new feature on an old version, or that code that used to parse on old versions would not longer work on the newer…

True - I don't think I really had my head screwed on there. It just 'feels different' because it's language level, the actual syntax, I suppose, but no - you're right.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#174

Post by true_religion »

mattip wrote: post #112
Uptrenda wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another suggestion to add for you all (IDK how helpful.) When I see PyPy I see that its speed is faster for CPU-bound work but I'm thinking there is also I/O bound work that would see significant increases in the load they can handle. You could host a page that benchmarks common tasks like HTTP req/s (different types) with asyncio vs CPython. Could even have an automated tool that allows projects to benchmark perform…

Benchmarks are tricky. Do you have a specific use case you want sped up?

It would also be nice to see benchmarks of how much faster PyPy is getting each version. I know there is a tracking page but it tracks dozens of tests and has no absolute reference summary by version.

An easy chart to show v3.x is 10% faster than the last version would be great.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#175

Post by lmeyerov »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #167
lmeyerov wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most programmers aren't writing scientific software, which you can tell by claims that nicer f-strings is a pressing concern .

We can play that game - items like GIL-free interpreters and memory views are pretty relevant to folks on the more demanding side of scientific computing. But my point is this is a head-in-sand game when the community vastly outweighs any individual feature. My experience with the scientific computing community is that the non-pypy portion of it is much bigger.

I'm not a pypy maintainer, so my only horse in this race is believing cpython folks benefit from seeing the pypy community prove Things Can Be Better. Part of that means I rather pypy live on by avoiding unforced errors.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#177

Post by cfbolztereick »

saila wrote: post #153
vector_spaces wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly correct. PyPy is a replacement for CPython 3.11, which aims to be fully compatible with pure Python code (C extensions are a more complicated story).

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#178

Post by adampunk »

networked wrote: post #48
QQ00 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Strange subthread. I don't see Claude Opus 4.6 changing the tide for PyPy. There is no need to understate AI capabilities for this. "Anthropic released vibe coded C compiler that doesn't work" sounds like https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/issues/1 passed through a game of telephone. The compiler has some wrong defaults that prevent it from straightforwardly building a "Hello, world!" like GCC and Clang…

This two week project did not displace GCC, one of the most complex pieces of machinery built by man, so the conclusion on hacker news is that AI is fake.

What you’re seeing is a shibboleth. If you can make the above claim without choking, then you’re a member of the tribe. If it seems so outlandish that honor and sense demand you point out the problems, you’re marked as an enemy.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#179

Post by ajross »

aftbit wrote: post #170
ajross wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Strongly disagree. If you're relying on Python garbage collection to free file descriptors in a loop, you have a subtle bug that will rear its head in unexpected and painful ways (and by some unwritten law of software, most notably either at 3 AM or when you have an important demo scheduled). This is true whether you're running in CPython or PyPy. It's not hard to avoid - use `with` or `try...finally`. It's not some…

> If you're relying on Python garbage collection to free file descriptors in a loop

Again, that's a proscription for how to write python code for future execution. It's emphatically not a statement for the behavior expected by python code already in production, which tends to rely on this behavior (along with many other such warts and subtleties) implicitly.

And the fact that PyPy doesn't feel the need to clone it (and all the others) explains why PyPy basically doesn't work for existing python code.

I mean, me being an idiot python developer in your eyes does nothing to make the ancient code I received run. It just makes you feel smarter. That's a bad trade.

PyPy needs to be compatible before anyone is going to use it. And it isn't. And so people didn't. And so now it's basically dying as no one wants to work on a project no one uses.

Re: Warn about PyPy being unmaintained

#180

Post by rurban »

mattip wrote: post #18

PyPy core dev here. If anyone is interested in helping out, either financially or with coding, we can be reached various ways. See https://pypy.org/contact.html

You really need free claude or gpt subscriptions for this maintainance updates. They published OSS support recently. Ask them.

Though they use an inflated star ranking system, which doesn't reflect reality.

Post reply on HN