[pypy-dev] Porting PyPy/rpython to Python 3

Armin Rigo arigo at tunes.org
Fri Apr 17 20:15:16 CEST 2015


Hi,

I have kept quiet on this issue, but I'd like to mention that I'm not
looking forward at all --but would accept it anyway if others deemed
it a good idea-- to have to write all my code in all of "rpython/" in
the restricted style of 2+3 mixed-mode code bases.

This might create a source of friction if me and other core devs are
not sold to the idea: we'll keep writing new code in the 2.7-only
style, or even accidentally refactor some pieces of code to a more
canonical 2.7 style.  Then if we get ready to set up a buildbot to run
all the tests with Python 3.x, and (more importantly) if we have
people that are dedicated to fixing failures shown only by that
buildbot, then this will introduce many conflicts with freshly-written
and actively-edited code.  General unhappiness will follow.

The only reasonable way I can see for this would really be for all
devs to write 2+3 mixed code in the first place, hence my position:
please convince me that it's worth it. :-)

My position about the Python 2.x/3.x issue is that I'm extremely happy
to deal with a *frozen* language when writing interpreters.  It avoids
a lot of maintenance cost to keep track of the latest version of
Python all the time, and this job of keeping track is imho pointless
in this specific context.  I'm not saying "Python 3 is bad" in
general!  But I'm saying "Python 3.x has no benefit for us, and it has
several issues."  These issues include the fact that it's not frozen.
Another one would be the fact that 3.x is more unicode-oriented: it
plays against us for writing interpreters for languages that have
different ways to support unicode that what (R)Python has, e.g.
utf8-everywhere, or 2- versus 4-bytes chars, etc.


A bientôt,

Armin.


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