[Python-Dev] Benchmarks why we need PEP 576/579/580 (original) (raw)

Jeroen Demeyer J.Demeyer at UGent.be
Sun Jul 22 16:11:25 EDT 2018

On 2018-07-22 14:52, Stefan Behnel wrote:

Someone has to maintain the existing code base and help newcomers to get into it and understand it.

This is an important point that people seem to be overlooking. The complexity and maintenance burden of PEP 580 should be compared to the status-quo. The existing code is complicated, yet nobody seems to find that a problem. But when PEP 580 makes changes to that complicated code (and documents some of the existing complexity), it's suddenly the fault of PEP 580 that the code is complicated.

I also wonder if there is a psychological difference simply because this is a PEP and not an issue on bugs.python.org. That might give the impression that it's a more serious thing somehow. Previous optimizations (https://bugs.python.org/issue26110 for example) were not done in a PEP and nobody ever mentioned that the extra complexity might be a problem.

Finally, in some ways, my PEP would actually be a simplification because it replaces several special cases by one general protocol. Admittedly, the general protocol that I propose is more complicated than each existing special case individually but the overall complexity might actually decrease.

Jeroen.

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