Comment by aragilar
15 days ago
There's a difference between dead (i.e. "unmaintained") and low activity ("not under active development"). From what I can see PyPy is in the latter category (and being in that category does not mean it's going to die soon), so choosing to claim it is unmaintained is notable.
Being three major versions behind CPython is definitely not a great sign for the long-term viability of it.
It's always been about that many versions behind.
There is more churn in those versions than you'd think.
I'd genuinely be curious what fraction of those changes actually requires porting to other Python implementations. The free-threading changes are inherently interpreter specific, so we can ignore those. A significant change in Python 3.12 is dropping "dead batteries", so that can be ignored as well. From what I can see, the main language changes are typing-based (so could have parser implications), and the subinterpreter support being exposed at the Python level (I don't know whether that makes sense for PyPy either). I think this hints that while certain area of Python are undergoing larger changes (e.g. typing, free-threading), there is no obvious missing piece that might drive someone to contribute to PyPy.
Also, looking at the alternate (full) interpreters that have been around a while, PyPy is much more active than either Jython or IronPython. Rust-python seems more active than PyPy, but it's not clear how complete it is (and has going through similar periods of low activity).
Would I personally use PyPy? I'm not planning to, but given how uv is positioning itself, this gives me vibes of youtube stating it will drop IE 6 at some unspecified time in order to kill IE 6 (see https://benjamintseng.com/2024/02/the-ie6-youtube-conspiracy...).
The problem is the million small paper cuts. The stdlib changes are not all in pure python, many have implications for compiled modules like _ssl. The interpreter changes, especially compatibility with small interpreter changes that are reflected in the dis module, also require work to figure out
I'm not sure "major versions" is the most correct term here, but I think your point is spot on
For Python, 0.1 increases are major versions and 1.0 increases are cataclysmic shifts.
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They are de facto semantic major versions - think of recent-ish additions like f-strings and match-case (3.7 and 3.11, I think), you'd get a syntax error in an older parser. PyPy targeting 3.9 for example would would support f-strings but not match-case.
Or at runtime, you can import things from the standard library which require a minimum 3.x. - .x releases frequently if not always add things, or even change an existing API.
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