Improvements to the Python core

[Paul Boddie]

On Dec 13, 3:56 am, Christian Heimes <li... at cheimes.de> wrote:
> Paul Boddie wrote:
> > Then you haven't been reading the right IRC channel recently. ;-)
>
> What's the right channel? I'm on #python and #python-dev

But where are people who might know Psyco likely to hang out? ;-)
Anyway, it remains to be seen what happens, but by reading various
conversations I get the impression that something could be afoot. I
wouldn't want to preempt any announcements, however, so I'll say no
more on the matter.

[Cross-compilation]

> I don't get your point, especially when you talk about distutils. Please
> elaborate.

>From memory, once the Python executable is built, there's some kind of
process where modules get built with the newly built Python (perhaps
the rule labelled "Build the shared modules" in the Makefile). This
doesn't go down well when cross-compiling Python.

> (C)Python has a well known process to get new features or changes into
> the language: Write a PEP, convince enough core developers and/or Guido,
> implement the feature. I don't see a PEP about JIT in the list at
> abouthttp://www.python.org/dev/peps/, do you? :]

PEPs are very much skewed towards language changes, which then
encourages everyone and their dog to submit language changes, of
course.

> Besides nobody is going to stop you from creating a fork. Christian
> Tismer forked of stackless years ago. It's a successful branch with
> useful additions to the language. It got never merged back because
> Christian didn't feel right about it.

I think we all appreciate the work done by the core developers to
improve Python's stability and performance; new language features
don't interest me quite as much: it was, after all, possible to write
working systems in Python 1.x, with the addition of Unicode probably
rounding out quite a decent subset of what the language offers today.
The demands for greater performance enhancements than those possible
by modifying the existing virtual machine conservatively may, however,
eventually lead people to consider other paths of development just as
Stackless emerged as a fork in order to offer things that CPython
could not.

I think the pressure to fork Python will only increase over time,
considering the above together with the not inconsiderable impact of
Python 3.0 and the dependencies on Python 2.x out there in lots of
places, typically out of sight (or at least, the immediate
consideration) of the core developers.

Paul