hpy VS nogil

There is a merge request up to add autogen rust bindings to hpy

https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy/pull/457

Are you referencing https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy?

I do hope it takes off.

The HPy project [0] seems like a promising way out of this.

[0] https://hpyproject.org/

socketify.py breaks the record for Python no other Python WebFramework/Server as able to reach 6.2 mi requests per second before in TechEmPower Benchmarks, this puts Python at the same level of performance that Golang, Rust and C++ for web development, in fact Golang got 5.2 mi req/s in this same round. Almost every server or web framework tries to use JIT to boost the performance, but only socketify.py deliveries this level of performance, and even without JIT socketify.py is twice as fast any other web framework/server in active development, and still can be much more optimized using HPy (https://hpyproject.org/). Python will get even faster and faster in future!

I think Propose a better messaging for Python is the option and a lot of languages will learn it from Rust, because rust erros are the best described errors I see in my life lol. Cargo is amazing and I think we will need a better poetry/pip for sure, HPy project will modernize extensions and packages 📦 too https://hpyproject.org/

It also show that PyPy3 will not magically boost your performance, you need to integrate in a manner that PyPy3 can optimize and delivery CPU performance, with a more complex example maybe it can help more. But why socketify is so much faster using PyPy3? The answer is CFFI, socketify did not use Cython for integration and cannot delivery the full performance on Python3, this will be solved with HPy.

HPy integration to better support CPython, PyPy and GraalPython

Absolutely everything in CPython is a PyObject, and that can’t be changed without breaking the C API. A PyObject contains (among other things) a type pointer, a reference count, and a data field; none of these things can be changed without (again) breaking the C API.

There have definitely been attempts to modernize; the HPy project (https://hpyproject.org/), for instance, moves towards a handle-oriented API that keeps implementation details private and thus enables certain optimizations.

This might be a dumb question, but why would removing the GIL break FFI? Is it just that existing no-GIL implementations/proposals have discarded/ignored it, or is there a fundamental requirement, e.g. C programs unavoidably interact directly with the GIL? I know that the C-API is only stable between minor releases [0] compiled in the same manner [1], so it's not like the ecosystem is dependent upon it never changing.

I cannot seem to find much discussion about this. I have found a no-GIL interpreter that works with numpy, scikit, etc. [2][3] so it doesn't seem to be a hard limit. (That said, it was not stated if that particular no-GIL implementation requires specially built versions of C-API libs or if it's a drop-in replacement.)

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html#c-api-stability

[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/c-api/stable.html#platform-conside...

[2]: https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

[3]: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-703-making-the-global-inter...

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil does manage to get rid of the GIL, but it's not certain to make it into Python core. The main problem is the amount of existing libraries that depend on the existence of the GIL without realizing it - breaking those would be extremely disruptive.

CPython is also investigating the removal of the GIL (PEP703, nogil). I think requiring the GIL is a wider thing that libraries will need to address anyway. But also, for the same reason as above I'd be surprised if the Modular team thought that saying "you can run all your python code unchanged" was a good idea if there was a secret "except for code that uses numpy" muttered under the breath.

I'm worried about the speedup

My understanding is that it's based on the most recent attempt to remove the GIL by Sam Gross

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

In addition to some ways to try to not have nogil have as much overhead he added a lot of unrelated speed improvements so that python without the gil would still be faster not slower in single thread mode. They seem to have merged those performance patches first that means if they add his Gil removal patches in say python 3.12 it will still be substantially slower then 3.11 although faster then 3.10. I hope that doesn't stop them from removing the gil (at least by default)

Looks like it's still active to me:

https://github.com/colesbury/nogil/