Is Unladen Swallow dead?

[John Nagle]

On 11/16/2010 10:24 PM, swapnil wrote:
> On Nov 17, 3:30 am, laspi<lorena.aspi... at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> There has been little or no activity at all in this project in the
>> last months, and the last comments on their mailing list seem to
>> conrfim that it's future is uncertain.
>> It's also very strange the lack of updates, news or discussions,
>> specially considering that the merging plan has been approved. Or it
>> hasn't?
>
> AFAIK, the merging plan was approved by Guido early this year. I guess
> Google is expecting the community to drive the project from here on.
> That was the whole idea for merging it to mainline. From my last
> conversation with Collin, they are targeting Python 3.3

     I think it's dead.  They're a year behind on quarterly releases.
The last release was Q3 2009.  The project failed to achieve its
stated goal of a 5x speedup. Not even close.  More like 1.5x
(http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146)

     The Google blog at
"http://groups.google.com/group/unladen-swallow/browse_thread/thread/f2011129c4414d04" 
says, as of November 8, 2010:

"Jeffrey and I have been pulled on to other projects of higher
importance to Google. Unfortunately, no-one from the Python
open-source community has been interested in picking up the merger
work, and since none of the original team is still full-time on the
project, it's moving very slowly. Finishing up the merger into the
py3k-jit branch is a high priority for me this quarter, but what
happens then is an open question."

     So Google has pulled the plug on Unladen Swallow.  It looks
like they underestimated the difficulty of speeding up the CPython
model.  The performance improvement achieved was so low
that cluttering up CPython with a JIT system and LLVM probably is
a lose.

				John Nagle