Python JIT project was asked to pause development

Qem

> For that reason, the Steering Council is formally requesting a Standards Track PEP be authored that the community can discuss and the Steering Council can formally accept (or reject), making the case for the JIT as a supported, non-experimental part of CPython: its guarantees, its maintenance commitments, and its impact on redistributors. I didn't notice the current PEP was a provisional one. Hope the new one gets approved. The experimental JIT was reported to finally breaking even and surpassing the default interpreter just a couple of months ago[1]. [1] https://fidget-spinner.github.io/posts/jit-on-track.html

nmstoker

Duplicate of here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48421400

OutOfHere

Losing development momentum for a beancounting reason like this one is a sure way to kill a project. It works every time. Once development is halted, it is very difficult to pick it back up.

jhayward

> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. If I were a contributor I would read such language as saying "we have no respect for you or your intelligence, so we'll just straight up gaslight you and expect you to accept it." The dictum can't be read literally - it has to be read like the manipulative, narcissist-speak that it is. And what it's telling you is - get out.

kelvinjps10

What a shame it will receive a halt when they where starting to make progress I know that after submitting the pep it will go back to development. But t would have been better to just keep the development and the pep for an actual release or continue and if gets rejected ask them to stop

12398761

That was kind of overdue. The project started five years ago while massively overpromising. They should perhaps have kept it in a separate branch back then, but now is the next best time. CPython's selling point was that it is simple, fast enough with C extensions and the code was accessible. Complicating the code base for occasional 50% speedups (and regressions ...) just isn't worth it. There are so many other languages that fill that need. Now, I hope that the PEP does not overpromise again and is accepted because of Instagram pressure. Instagram can keep its own JIT fork or switch to PHP, Go or whatever.

IshKebab

Seems reasonable. As I understand it the JIT implementation has not really been successful anyway.

simonw

"Asked to pause development" isn't entirely accurate: they were asked to pause landing new features (as opposed to bug fixes) on the cPython main branch.

mwkaufma

>> While the intent is not to call for competing proposals, we believe that now is a good time to discuss and propose alternative proposals as well. lol >> For example, rather than proposing one single concrete JIT implementation, it may make more sense for the PEP to describe a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies. poison-pill requirement >> We are setting a window of six months for a PEP to be submitted and resolved. If no such PEP is accepted within that window, the JIT code must be removed from the main branch so it's going to be removed from the main branch

oefrha

Sounds reasonable given the recent YOLO GC debacle https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in... .

questiuner

Why was PyPy abandoned and not embraced by Python? NIH?

mellosouls

Editorialised title. Development hasn't been paused (with negative implications). It's now considered significant enough that they've requested feature freeze in CPython main until governance/process questions are settled.

Fraterkes

People in this thread writing conspiracy theories over the biggest language in the world requiring a bit of bureaucracy lends some credence to the idea that programming is not real engineering.

dist-epoch

There is a large graveyard of JITs and JIT-adjacent projects for Python. By now it should be clear to anybody working on Python JIT that the probability of failure is 90%. The future is probably rewriting performance critical Python code in Rust instead of trying to fix Python. Or maybe a future LLM could add a JIT to Python in an effort-run.

sitkack

I have used Python as my main language since the late 90s and it has been over the last decade and half been getting more unserious. It would be nice if cpython opened up a bit, pluggable GC and JIT would go along way towards reducing this manufactured drama. It wasn't cool to see PyPy or Stackless getting sidelined.

ospider

This is really a sad moment, I hope the free-theading feature can be kept in the main line. For me, running my library in real threads has actuall revealed some hidden fatal bugs which are hard to reproduce with the GIL> As for performance, Python 3.x was not even as fast as Python 2.x in the beginning, but with the correct mindset, it's eventually faster.