[Numpy-discussion] PEP 574 - zero-copy pickling with out of band data

[Andrea Gavana]

Hi,


On Tue, 3 Jul 2018 at 09.20, Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 03, 2018 at 08:54:51AM +0200, Andrea Gavana wrote:
> > This sound so very powerful... it’s such a pity that these type of gems
> won’t
> > be backported to Python 2 - we have so many legacy applications smoothly
> > running in Python 2 and nowhere near the required resources to even start
> > porting to Python 3,
>
> I am a strong defender of stability and long-term support in scientific
> software. But what you are demanding is that developers who do free work
> do not benefit from their own work to have a more powerful environment.
>
> More recent versions of Python are improved compared to older ones and
> make it much easier to write certain idioms. Developers make these
> changes over years to ensure that codebases are always simpler and more
> robust. Backporting in effect means doing this work twice, but the second
> time with more constraints. I just allocated something like a man-year to
> have robust parallel-computing features work both on Python 2 and Python
> 3. With this man-year we could have done many other things. Did I make
> the correct decision? I am not sure, because this is just creating more
> technical dept.
>
> I understand that we all sit on piles of code that we wrote for a given
> application and one point, and that we will not be able to modernise it
> all. But the fact that we don't have the bandwidth to make it evolve
> probably means that we need to triage what's important and call a loss
> the rest. Just like if I have 5 old cars in my backyard, I won't be able
> to keep them all on the road unless I am very rich.
>
>
> People asking for infinite backport to Python 2 are just asking
> developers to write them a second free check, even larger than the one
> they just got by having the feature under Python 3.
>

Just to clarify: I wasn’t asking for anything, just complimenting Antoine’s
work for something that appears to be a wonderful feature. There was a bit
of rant from my part for sure, but I’ve never asked for someone to redo the
work to make it run on Python 2.

Allocating a resource to port hundreds of thousand of LOC is close to an
impossibility in the industry I work in, especially because our big team
(the two of us) don’t code for a living, we have way many different duties.
We code to make our life easier.

I’m happy if you feel better after your tirade.

Andrea.




>
> Gaël
>
>
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