[Python-Dev] On porting to Python 3 as the answer (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Sun Mar 23 18:08:35 CET 2014

On Mar 23, 2014, at 12:33 PM, Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Am 23.03.14 17:22, schrieb Guido van Rossum:

At Dropbox I work with a large group of very capable developers on several large code bases that are currently in 2.7. We are constantly changing our code to make it more secure (there are several teams specifically in charge of that). And yet porting to Python 3 is completely out of scope, for a variety of reasons.

Please stop your wishful thinking. I can stop expressing it; I don't think I can stop wishing it :-) If it's really unrealistic that Dropbox will ever port the code to Python 3, would you then think that Python 3 is a doomed project, since it won't ever see significant usage?

I think expecting every production instance of Python 2.7 to port is unrealistic. New projects will start to get written in Python 3, some existing projects will get ported over time. But I doubt there is ever going to be some mass exodus where everyone suddenly starts moving to Python 3.

For people/companies/projects where Python 2 is currently working fine and porting would be a significant effort they have to decide between adding more value to their project through bug fixes, new features, etc or essentially sinking cost into Porting to Python 3 which their end users will not benefit from in a very large way. It’s hard to make that business case for existing code, especially given that for a lot of the truly hard parts of porting to Python 3 there’s no way to port module by module so you have to basically do an entire code base at once. This adds extra churn, increases the risk for new bugs, and is quite an annoying process.

That doesn’t mean Python 3 is bad or is inherently a doomed project, but it’s essentially a new, but very similar, language.

Regards, Martin

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