Hi,
I wrote a quick & dirty parser to compute statistics on *new* CPython
core developer per year using the following page as data:
https://devguide.python.org/developers/
2007: 15
2008: 19
2009: 11
2010: 20
2011: 12
2012: 9
2013: 4
2014: 10
2015: 2
2016: 5
2017: 2
Compare these numbers to Stéphane Wirtel's statistics on pull requests:
https://speakerdeck.com/matrixise/cpython-loves-your-pull-requests
=> Number of active core developerson on GitHub pull requests: 27
(stats from February 2017 to October 2017)
(I'm not sure of the meaning of this number, it's the number of core
developer who authored pull requests, I don't think that it counts
core developers who only made reviews.)
If you look at the size of the source code, it's still growing
constanly since 1990:
https://www.openhub.net/p/python/
2007: around 783k lines
2010: around 683k lines
2013: around 800k lines
2015: around 875k lines
2017: around 973k lines
The number of bugs is also constanly growing. Statistics on bugs since 2011:
https://bugs.python.org/issue?@template=stats
2011: around 2500 open issues
2013: around 4000 open issues
2015: around 5000 open issues
2017: around 6200 open issues
Do realize that open issues is a really misleading statistic as they include enhancement requests which we historically never close unless there's zero chance we will accept such a change.
The size of the CPython project is constantly growing as its
complexity (technical debt? what is this? :-)), but the growth of core
developers is slowing down.
Well, you added code to speed up Unicode encoding/decoding, right? So it's just adding stuff to keep things performant as well as new things. It's just what happens when you're willing to improve things.
I do consider that we need more people to handle the growing number of
issues and pull requests, so the question is now how to find and
"hire" (sorry, promote) them ;-)
Maybe we have a problem with mentoring. Maybe the CPython code base
became too hard to train newcomers? Maybe we are too conservative? I
don't know.
I think it's partially a fact that Python's popularity has increased the pool size of contributors, so lots of people grabbing individual things. This leads to less of a chance to make sustained contributions. E.g. when I became a core dev it was because I was able to grab a new issue to work on that was easy at a very regular cadence, but I don't know if I could rectify that at this point.