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We all know (well — unless you’ve under a rock) about Unladen-Swallow, the semi-Google-Sponsored optimization-focused branch of Python 2.x. Collin, Jef­frey and many oth­ers have been work­ing tire­lessly on port­ing the CPython inter­preter over to LLVM, apply­ing opti­miza­tion patches, writ­ing tests, etc all aimed at speed­ing up real-world oper­a­tions and code since before last year’s PyCon — at that time, the first release was already work­ing hard, ren­der­ing YouTube’s tem­plates. (See the Project Plan for more information)

You prob­a­bly also saw the 2009Q3 testing/performance results (here), show­ing a hefty speed increase for var­i­ous oper­a­tion. The 2009Q4 will be com­ing soon.

What you prob­a­bly don’t know — yet, is that a PEP is com­ing, propos­ing Unladen Swal­low be merged back to Python-core — specif­i­cally, the Python 3k branch. Yeah, that’s right — a PEP to merge Unladen Swal­low back into the moth­er­ship, but to Py3k only. Talk about a shot in the arm!

Quot­ing Collin Winter:

Python 3 is the nat­ural place for some­thing like Unladen Swal­low to land: Python 3 is clearly the future, and I think improved per­for­mance will be a strong sell­ing point in the language’s favor. What we and oth­ers have done for Python 2 applies directly to Python 3.

…

One of the things we’ve really focused on with Unladen Swal­low is cre­at­ing a solid foun­da­tion that the wider CPython devel­oper com­mu­nity can build on top of. We’ve fixed some nasty prob­lems in the x86-64 JIT, for exam­ple, so that the CPython com­mu­nity can focus on the fun stuff — more opti­miza­tions! Hav­ing the basic JIT infra­struc­ture in place and well-tested opens up a world of oppor­tu­ni­ties that didn’t exist before.

…

I think PyPy’s focus on research is incred­i­bly valu­able. Unladen Swal­low has always been about, “what can we achieve right now?” One of our guid­ing prin­ci­ples has been, Do noth­ing orig­i­nal, don’t be inno­v­a­tive. PyPy is look­ing 10 years down the road and think­ing, What can we do if we ques­tion every­thing? I think hav­ing those dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives is impor­tant to the com­mu­nity. So, no, I don’t see us in com­pe­ti­tion (with PyPy) at all.

There’s been a lot of talk about how slow adop­tion of 3k has been — a back­wards incom­pat­i­ble imple­men­ta­tion of a widely used lan­guage will always have slow(er) adop­tion then releases of the same lan­guage, back­wards com­pat­i­ble — but I’d argue that to an extent, part of the rea­son is that there “haven’t been enough car­rots” in the Py3k cart to pro­vide enough of an incen­tive for projects, libraries, etc to move to it at an accel­er­ated rate.

This, well — this changes things. A sig­nif­i­cantly faster inter­preter, a more ratio­nal GIL thanks to Antoine Pitrou — these are the improve­ments to Python 3 which make it the per­fect tar­get to aim for for new projects and libraries. It should dras­ti­cally help pro­vide the impe­tus for larger libraries to move over. Things like these are exactly why some­thing like the mora­to­rium make sense, efforts can be focused on the ecosys­tem of python out­side of the syn­tax, on the inter­preter, the stan­dard library, etc.

This is huge; and with a lit­tle luck, a lot of dis­cus­sion and debate — and a ton of work, by the end of 2010, we’ll have not only the best imple­men­ta­tion of Python, as a lan­guage to date in Python 3 — but the best inter­preter as well.

The PEP should go out for review soon, prob­a­bly within the next two weeks — and more details/information will be com­ing out at PyCon in Feb­ru­ary (you’re com­ing, right?!).

Also see Michael Foord’s post about this news too.

We all know (well - unless you've under a rock) about Unladen-Swallow, the semi-Google-Sponsored optimization-focused branch of Python 2.x. Collin, Jeffrey and many others have been working tirelessly on porting the CPython interpreter over to LLVM, applying optimization patches, writing tests, etc all aimed at speeding up real-world operations and code since before last ...