The team behind Pyston, the high-performance Python implementation originally developed by cloud storage provider Dropbox, has announced plans for the future, including 64-bit ARM support and a proper CI/CD system.

Pyston was open source until version 2.0, then spent some time in a closed source model before being taken back to open source earlier this year.

The plans follow the news in August that the Pyston developers have joined Anaconda, where they can continue developing Pyston. They have now set out a road map for the future of Pyston.

The team would like to increase the number of users of Pyston, so say their first move is to remove some of the reasons that make it difficult to use Pyston. They say the performance isn't an issue, as Pyston is currently 30% faster on its benchmarks and 60% faster on commonly-used benchmarks. In view of this, the team will concentrate on reducing obstacles rather than working on performance.

The first move in this is to create pre-compiled versions to make the software easier to install, and the option chosen is to provide the packages through conda.

Once that's in place, the plans start with setting up a CI/CD system and adding support for 64-bit ARM, along with some work on performance.

In the longer term, the road map is to add Mac and Windows support, integrate with Numba and improve multithreading, along with exploring “opt-in” features that allow the team to break semantics.
We’ve decided that we only have the resources to target a single version of Python at a time. We would love to be able to provide a version of Pyston regardless of the version of Python you want, but that’s not feasible given our small team.

In terms of Python versions, the software currently targets Python 3.8.12, and the team plans to retarget to Python 3.10 some time in early 2022. They say they intend to backport parts of the “Faster CPython” effort going on in 3.11 depending on the level of compatibility.

Pyston is available on GitHub.

More Information

Pyston on GitHub

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