[Idle-dev] The Future of Python

[Glyph]

On Feb 10, 2014, at 5:19 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> Then we're doomed, because this is entirely political (the companies making browsers must want to do it).

Not at all.  There are a number of promising proofs of concept, demonstrating different aspects of this problem: Pyjamas, the PyJS fork of Pyjamas, Skulpt, Empythoned (which actually compiles CPython to run in the browser with surprisingly reasonable performance!), Brython, and PyPy's now defunct JS backend to name a few.  With source maps, it's even possible to use native JavaScript debugging and profiling tools on Browser-hosted Python.

The political problem is entirely based around getting the various interested parties together and trying to hammer out some kind of common core that they can all get running and contribute to, rather than duplicating tons and tons of effort and only ever getting to a 60% solution.

Browser vendors seem perfectly happy to treat JavaScript as a compilation target; efforts like ASM.JS are in fact trying to formalize this process and provide support for it.  Most of these Py-to-JS converters work fine on mobile devices, too.

Guido, if you haven't checked it out, <http://www.brython.info> is a very interesting demo: it literally makes <script type="text/python3"> work in a web page, with nothing beyond a single JavaScript file include (no local compilation, no offline processing).  The only problem is that the language really isn't quite Python - see, for example, <https://bitbucket.org/olemis/brython/issue/147/generators-send-method-missed>.  But they've made a surprising amount of progress since I last checked, and they seem to be closing issues all the time :-).

-glyph

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