On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 8:20 PM Gregory P. Smith <greg@krypto.org> wrote:

On Fri, May 7, 2021 at 6:51 PM Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 01:53:34PM +0100, Mark Shannon wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> CPython is slow. We all know that, yet little is done to fix it.
>
> I'd like to change that.
> I have a plan to speed up CPython by a factor of five over the next few
> years. But it needs funding.

I've noticed a lot of optimization-related b.p.o. issues created by
Mark, which is great. What happened with Mark's proposal here? Did the
funding issue get sorted?

I believe Guido has Mark contracting on Python performance through Microsoft?

For those who didn't attend the Language Summit yesterday, this is indeed the case. We've been in stealth mode until the summit, but the cat is now definitely out of the bag -- Microsoft is thanking the Python community by funding work to speed up CPython. Besides Mark and myself, Eric Snow (a MS employee like myself) is also full-time on this project. We expect to be adding a few more people to the team.

Mark has already revealed his PEP 659 (Specializing Adaptive Interpreter).

We've also created a small GitHub org: https://github.com/faster-cpython/, containing several repos:

- https://github.com/faster-cpython/cpython, a fork of cpython where we do the work (PRs will mostly come from here)
- https://github.com/faster-cpython/tools, a set of tools we're using for benchmarking and analysis and the like (the README contains some stats we've gathered on bytecode occurrence)
- https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas, a tracker where we're discussing various plans and ideas

Contributions are welcome!

I've also published the slides of my language summit presentation: https://github.com/faster-cpython/ideas/blob/main/FasterCPythonDark.pdf

--
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)