On 30 January 2018 at 14:24, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
This is often undervalued, but shouldn't be! Moore's Law doesn't apply to humans, and you can't effectively or cost efficiently scale up by throwing more bodies at a project. Python is one of the best languages (and ecosystems!) that make the development experience fun, high quality, and very efficient.
I'll also note that one of the things we (and others) *have* been putting quite a bit of time into is the question of "Why do people avoid using extension modules for code acceleration?". While there are definitely still opportunities to speed up the CPython interpreter itself, they're never going to compete for raw speed with the notion of "Let's just opt out of Python's relatively expensive runtime bookkeeping for lower level code units, and use native machine types instead". (Before folks say "But what about PyPy/Numba/etc?": this is what those tools do as well, they're just able to analyse your running code and do it on the fly, rather than having an outer feedback loop of humans doing it explicitly in version control based on benchmarks, flame graphs, and other performance profiling tools) And on that front, things have progressed quite a bit in the past few years: * wheel files & the conda ecosystem mean that precompiled binaries are often readily available for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux x86_64 * tools like pysip and milksnake are working to reduce the combinatorial explosion of potential wheel build targets * tools like Cython work to lower barriers to entry between working with dynamic compilation and working with precompiled systems (this is also where Grumpy fits in, but targeting Go rather than C/C++) * at the CPython interpreter level, we continue to work to reduce the differences between what extension modules can do and what regular source and bytecode modules can do There are still lots of other things it would be nice to have (such as transplanting the notion of JavaScript source maps so that debuggers can more readily map Python pyc files and extension modules back to the corresponding lines of source code), but the idea of "What about precompiling an extension module?" is already markedly less painful than it used to be. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia