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Google Boosts Python By Turning It Into Go (infoworld.com)

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld: Grumpy, an experimental project from Google, transpiles Python code into Go, allowing Python programs to be compiled and run as static binaries using the Go toolchain... In a blog post announcing the open source release, Google stated the project stemmed from its efforts to speed up the Python-powered front end for YouTube. But Google hit an obstacle that's familiar to folks who've deployed Python in production: It's hard to get CPython -- the default Python interpreter written in C -- to scale efficiently. "We think Grumpy has the potential to scale more gracefully than CPython for many real world workloads," writes Google...

Because it doesn't support C extensions, Grumpy doesn't have CPython's Global Interpreter Lock, which is commonly cited as a roadblock to running Python concurrent workloads smoothly. Grumpy also uses Go's garbage collection mechanisms to manage memory under the hood, instead of CPython's. Grumpy creates close interoperation between Python and Go by allowing Go packages to be imported and used with the same syntax as Go modules.

1 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Just another f***ing kludge to get around by CQDX · · Score: 5, Informative

    Python's GIL. Pythonistas keeping pushing for Python everywhere but don't realize that Python does have its limits and is not the language of choice if you need performance on multiple cores. In my experience, when you try to emulate multithreading in Python using some message passing scheme you end up with something that is more complicated, harder to debug and tune, harder to maintain, than the equivalent written in good C++.