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Back from Europython 2013 in Florence for a while now. I had a presentation about my Python compiler Nuitka . You can watch the Video on Youtube. I believe it’s absolutely worth your time. I was not doing a lot of “why” at all now, only “what”, and demo times, and answering questions:
The talk went really well. I believe one can clearly see that I felt really good and at ease. The state presented is very good and progress - there was a lot, so that was great. The slides of the talk may also be interesting.
And it definitely raised a lot of interest.
Last years talk is also there. You can (maybe) see that I was 20kg more weight then, and also much more excited, at least initially. Background: I was surprised then that Guido van Rossum was attending the talk, plus I was kind of not in the state of this year, the confidence that people should believe, that things will work after that, was not yet there. I knew it, but standing in front of a croud and saying, look I am attempting what you consider impossible, or even have failed at, is not easy:
There are also the slides of that talk which may also be interesting, but of course are outdated somewhat now.
So yeah, the progress happened since 2012 made a difference. Nuitka has proven things. Let’s see what this year does to it. I would hope for real type inference optimization and portable mode to be there next year.
Consider that is the a spare time effort . Lots of people lauded it for the out of the box experience, and how it just works. That’s right. I put a lot of focus on stability, correctness, and ease of use. In fact, since my return, I have mostly worked on the feedback I got in that domain.
But for the relatively small amount of time I can invest (outside of holidays), it’s make very fast progress.
The feedback during the conference was great. While Nuitka is not yet seeing a lot of users, and not as many contributions or donations as I would hope for, but that’s kind of expected with my out of the box thinking there.
Few people at Europython really need a Python compiler. The most important exception are scientific people, doing number crunching. And I made some interesting contacts there.
Since my return, I have been receiving a bunch of bug reports. Some of which were unfortunately regressions of 0.4.4, and these got fixed in two hotfix releases. Currently 0.4.4.2 is released, and contains a huge amount of fixes, mostly stuff found by the surge new users.
But I deserved that, having said that I didn’t have to do hotfixes for a while now.
Such a lovely place, and so lovely people. It’s a tourist place, true, but it’s very open minded. The food is extremely good. And going from the conference hotel straight over to the river to meet up and have a few beers was very comfortable for after-conference stuff.
Now that I have been there 2 times, and the conference even 3 times, it’s moving on, to Berlin, which I sort of regret. Knowing the place somewhat definitely is an advantage by itself.
One thing that came to my mind during the conference, witnessing the large amount of non-satisfaction, was that the community is fed up with the leadership. Questioned about lack of Python3 adoption, a PSF guy in his presentation said they were 3 years into a 5 years plan, and got interrupted by laughter.
It may be about time, somebody actually gets up, removes the GIL and has a Python2.8 that is compatible. Obviously that’s much more useful. It could be a Python3.x with compatibility names of modules, print statement, and dict.iteritems added, probably also making some of the unicode mess more harmless, and providing unicode and long built-in names.
print
dict.iteritems
unicode
long
Considering that I have in fact been playing with the idea of forking CPython top versions, to add things, that would allow Nuitka to work better with it, that could be a staging ground, where such changes are nurtured. On the other hand, Nuitka is too irrelevant yet to drive this, and it would detract me away from it.
So Nuitka got a lot more exposure. And one guy watching the talk even created a really nice logo for it. I will make it a separate announcement though, and the next release is going to use it.
And in the aftermath, there were much bug useful reports. And new ideas. And reinforcement that what I am doing is actually useful to some people already.
My travel to Florence was in part funded by donations. Thanks a lot to all of you who have given, and who would like to also make a donation . Should I receive sufficient donations, I intend to go to FOSDEM 2014 as well.
Going to Berlin will be a bit cheaper this time around, as I can travel there via train.
The Europython 2012 and 2013 both are among the times of my life.