[pypy-dev] Parallella open hardware platform

[John Camara]

Fijal,

Whether someone works full time on a project is a separate issue.

Being popular helps attract additional resources and PyPy is a project that
could use additional resources.  How many additional optimizations could
PyPy add to get to a similar level of optimization to say the JVM.  We are
talking many many man years of work.  How much additional work is it to
develop and maintain backends for the various ARM, PPC, MIPS, etc
processors  How much work would it take to have PyPy support multi-cores?
 What if RPython needs to be significantly refactored or replaced. And we
can go on and on.

Typically every 10 years or so a new language becomes dominate but
that hasn't happen lately.  Java had been in the role for quite some time
and for quite a few years it has be on the decline but yet no language has
taken it's place in terms of dominance.  The main reason why this hasn't
happen so far is that no language has successfully dealt with the
multi-core issue in a way that also keeps other desirable features we
currently have with popular languages.  But at some point, a language will
prevail and become dominate and when that happens there will be a mass
migration to this language.  It doesn't mean that Python and other
currently popular languages are just going to go away, it just their use
will decline.  If Python's popularity declines significantly it will in
turn impact PyPy.  Also many of the earlier adopters of PyPy are more
likely to move on to the new dominate language. So where does that leave
you.  I expect you earn a living by doing PyPy consulting and thus you need
PyPy to be popular.

Now you don't have to believe that a new dominate language will occur but
history says otherwise and many have been fooled into thinking otherwise is
the past.

I feel PyPy is Python's best chance at being able to survive this change in
language dominance as it has the best chance of being able to do something
about the multi-core situation.  I'm glad the other day you mentioned about
the web stack as if you didn't mention it I likely would not have thought
about the PyPy hypervisor scenario. I'm starting to believe that approach,
may have some decent merit to it and allow a way to kick the can down the
road on the multi-core issues.  I don't have the time to get into it right
now but I start a new thread on the topic.  Maybe within the next few days.

John


On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 4:33 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 6:41 AM, John Camara <john.m.camara at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Fijal,
> >
> > In the past you have complained about it being hard to make money in open
> > source. One way to make it easier for you is grow the popularity of PyPy.
> > So I would think you would at least have some interest in thinking of
> ways
> > to accomplish that.
>
> Before even reading further - how is being popular making money? Being
> popular is being popular. Do you know any CPython developer working
> full time on CPython? CPython is definitely popular by my standards
>
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