[Python-Dev] Cython for cPickle? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Apr 23 04:09:35 CEST 2012

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 9:27 AM, Alexandre Vassalotti <alexandre at peadrop.com> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 6:12 PM, <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Of course, this being free software, anybody can spend time on whatever they please, and this should not make anybody feel sad. You just don't get merits if you work on stuff that nobody cares about.

Yes, of course. I don't want to discourage anyone to investigate this option—in fact, I would very much like to see myself proven wrong. But, if I understood Stefan correctly, he is proposing to have a GSoC student to do the work, to which I would feel uneasy about since we have no idea how valuable this would be as a contribution. So long as it's made clear to the students applying that it's a proof of concept that may return a negative result (i.e. "it was tried, it proved to be a bad idea") I don't see a problem with it. The freedom to try out multiple ideas in parallel is one of the great strengths of open source. We've had GSoC students try unsuccessful experiments in the past and have gained useful information as a result (e.g. the main reason I know the Import Engine API proposed in the deferred PEP 406 isn't adequate as currently written is because of the design level problems Greg found when implementing it last summer. The currently documented design simply doesn't achieve the full objectives of the PEP)

However, I think that in this case the success may be predetermined, or at least not determined by technical success alone. I have a lot of respect for Cython, but I don't think it is right to have any part of core Python depend on it. Cython is an incredibly complex and relatively young (and still fast evolving) piece of technology, while I think that core dependencies should be minimized and limited to absolutely fundamental building blocks.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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