[BangPypers] Unladen Swallow for Py3k

[Anand Balachandran Pillai]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Anand Balachandran Pillai <
> abpillai at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Details here
> > >
> >
> http://jessenoller.com/2010/01/06/unladen-swallow-python-3s-best-feature/
> > >
> > >
> >  Interesting to read about that merge back to py3k. Never read
> >  any related posts in pydev yet. I wonder if Guido is ok with this.
> >
> >  Looks like Python is being swallowed by Google folks. Maybe
> >  this is a required shot-in-the-arm, to have a few funded devs
> >  to inject mojo into Python, but in the long term, I am not
> >  so sure about how it affects its status as a true "free"
> >  language.
> >
>
>
> Can you elaborate a little about the "free" part?
>
> Do you expect the Google to treat Python like Sun treated Java in the early
> days?
>

 Well, not really, since the comparison is not correct. Java started its
 life as a proprietary baby conceived inside Sun and got opened up
 later.

 What I am more worried is that if Google produces a CPython
 implementation on *nix which is say 50-100 times faster than
 the main CPython implementation for most common operations,
 then with Google's influence and muscle, wouldn't this become
 the choice of many high end users and not the regular CPython ?
 That won't bode well for the future of Python as a true "free"
 language - free as in the sense of 90% of the work not coming
 from a corporate entity here. Technically it is still free since they
 have to keep the license compatibility, but implementation-wise,
 it is Google-Python. In short I am worried about a major "fork"
 in Python.

 There is not much chance of all these patches getting merged
 to CPython mainline. First of all I don't think they should approach
 LLVM as a panacea to fix all Python VM ills - which they seem to be
 doing.

 It would be better if we see an experimental branch of CPython
 branched from py3k trunk to which many of the more experimental
 and incompatible bytecode changes go from Unladen Swallow. But
 as I pointed out earlier, I am a lurker in pydev and have not seen any
 such discussion yet.



>
>
> --
> ~noufal
> http://nibrahim.net.in
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-- 
--Anand