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Project Verona: Fearless Concurrency for Python

https://microsoft.github.io/verona/pyrona.html
45•ptx•2d ago

Comments

fmajid•1h ago
Microsoft laid off the Faster CPython lead Mark Shannon and ended support for the project, where does this leave the Verona project?
pjmlp•48m ago
They belong to Microsoft Research not DevDiv, so while that doesn't protect them from layoffs, certainly gives them some protection being under different management.

Microsoft Research sites tend to be based in collaborations with university research labs.

kubb•1h ago
Sounds like a fun job, I’d love to do something like this in my 9 to 5.

It’s also amazing how much work goes into making Python a decent platform because it’s popular. Work that will never be finished and could have been avoided with better design.

Get users first, lock them in, fix problems later seems to be the lesson here.

fastball•46m ago
Imo it is less about locking anyone in (in this case) and more about what Python actually enables: exceedingly fast prototyping and iteration. Turns out the ability to ship fast and iterate is actually more useful that performance, esp in a web context where the bottlenecks are frequently not program execution speed.
procaryote•13m ago
Python has compounding problems that make it extremely tricky though.

If it was just slow because it was interpreted they could easily have added a good JIT or transpiler by now, but it's also extremely dynamic so anything can change at any time, and the type mess doesn't help.

If it was just slow one could parallelise, but it has a GIL (although they're finally trying to fix it), so one needs multiple processes.

If it just had a GIL but was somewhat fast, multiple processes would be OK, but as it is also terribly slow, any single process can easily hit its performance limit if one request or task is slow. If you make the code async to fix that you either get threads or extremely complex cooperative multitasking code that keeps breaking when there's some bit of slow performance or blocking you missed

If the problem was just the GIL, but it was OK fast and had a good async model, you could run enough processes to cope, but it's slow so you need a ridiculous number, which has knock-on effects on needing a silly number of database/api connections

I've tried very hard to make this work, but when you can replace 100 servers struggling to serve the load on python with 3 servers running Java (and you only have 3 because of redundancy as a single one can deal with the load), you kinda give up on using python for a web context

If you want a dynamic web backend language that's fast to write, typescript is a much better option, if you can cope with the dependency mess

If it's a tiny thing that won't need to scale or is easy to rewrite if it does, I guess python is ok

darkwater•43m ago
> Get users first, lock them in, fix problems later seems to be the lesson here.

Or with a less cynical spin: deliver something that's useful and solves a problem for your potential users, and iterate over that without dying in the process (and Python suffered a lot already in the 2 to 3 transition)

pjmlp•46m ago
This looks like a pivot on the Project Verona research, as there have not been much other papers out since the initial announcement, regarding the programming language itself.
zenkey•27m ago
I've been programming with Python for over 10 years now, and I use type hints whenever I can because of how many bugs they help catch. At this point, I'm beginning to form a rather radical view. As LLMs get smarter and vibe coding (or even more abstract ways of producing software) becomes normalized, we'll be less and less concerned about compatibility with existing codebases because new code will be cheaper, faster to produce, and more disposable. If progress continues at this pace, generating tests with near 100% coverage and fully rewriting libraries against those tests could be feasible within the next decade. Given that, I don't think backward compatibility should be the priority when it comes to language design and improvements. I'm personally ready to embrace a "Python 4" with a strict ownership model like Rust's (hopefully more flexible), fully typed, with the old baggage dropped and all the new bells and whistles. Static typing should also help LLMs produce more correct code and make iteration and refactoring easier.
oivey•11m ago
I mean, why not just write Rust at that point? Required static typing is fundamentally at odds with the design intent of the language.
procaryote•9m ago
100% coverage won't catch 100% of bugs of course

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Project Verona: Fearless Concurrency for Python

https://microsoft.github.io/verona/pyrona.html
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