placeholder VS polonius

This guy wasn't maintaining Python, he as creating a new version incompatible with either Python 2.7 or Python 3.

Red Hat and other large companies have maintained Python for years after 2.7 died (EOL date was January 1st, 2020). IBM/Red Hat offer Python 2.7 including security fixes and bug fixes until 2024 (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/4455511).

Had he just provided patches to Python 2.7, nobody would've batted an eye. Instead, they created an alternative language that was completely different (https://web.archive.org/web/20161210161837/https://www.nafta...).

Founders and core devs indicated that the name was the only problem (https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon/issues/47#issuecomm...) and that even things like the header file names could continue to be named Python because of API compatibility.

You can fork any open source project you like, but you still need to stick follow trademark law. You can't just release Linux 2.7 because you disagree with breaking changes in 3.0 either, but you're free to take the Linux code and release Twonux if you really care.

If that doesn't work for some reason, there's this project which claims to be an "active" fork of Python 2, but it also has a lot of backports and additions so I worry a bit about backward compatibility and stability: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon You would have to build this from source as well.

Without developers of the compilers all others groups are pretty much irrelevant. There were lots of people who were telling that Python3 is abomination and some even attempted to fork it but fork haven't caught enough interest thus Python2 is, for all intends and purposes, dead.

Python developers noticed that people are not in any hurry to switch but instead of trying to understand “why” they have drawn the line in the sand and spent their efforts trying to kill unofficial attempts to create a fork.

WinAmp 2 (1998) was widely liked. WinAmp 3 (2002) was considered bloated, and flopped.

So Nullsoft followed it up with WinAmp 5 – because 2+3=5 – in 2003, which was very broadly the codebase of WinAmp 2 (small and lean) plus the skin support from WinAmp 3 (the only part people liked).

This won people back, and WinAmp is still around and got an update this year, 20 years on.

I think it's too late for there to be a Python 5, but I did read a blog post long ago – which I can't find again, or I'd link to it – which proposed a similar compromise fix to Python, in considerable technical detail.

I am with @blagie on this: the Python world handled the 2→3 transition spectacularly badly. V3 didn't deliver enough, and strong-arming people by just end-of-lifing Python 2 and expecting the world to move on was foolhardy and short-sighted.

(And I don't even use the language myself. I'm just observing.)

It's a real shame Tauthon didn't get more traction and support.

https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

If it had got enough support and continued, maybe the Python maintainers would have learned something, but I've not seen any sign that they have.

This is nothing new. For comparison, Perl 6 went so badly that Perl 5 now looks likely to continue as Perl 7:

https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/

And PHP 6 didn't really happen -- AFAICT as a total outsider, Unicode support proved too hard and it was never released; the community backported the important bits to PHP 5, and then a new PHP 7, more modest in scope, developed from PHP 5.

The Python world could have done the same, and Tauthon was an effort in that direction.

It's too late now. I suspect that, just as Perl has lost a massive amount of interest and use, partly from the nearly-two-decade-long effort to release Perl 5, Python has done the same -- sabotaged its own community with this high-handed "your leaders know best" approach.

I just can't see a major fork happening (see: Tauthon, a fork of 2.7 to keep it alive, but no updates in a year or so).

If you want forks there are forks. Off the top of my head, Redhat is supporting Python 2 for several more years and there's a project called Tauthon [1] that is "Python 2.8" in spirit. I'm sure there's more efforts I'm not aware of.

[1] https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon

Correctness prover which uses lifetimes (Polonius).

And, well, polonius (Rust borrow checker magic) I believe is built on datalog-ish concepts: https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius

There is also polonius (https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius) which should replace the borrow checker but does not receive a lot of development resources.

This is eventually going to be a feature-complete compiler, targeting a specific rustc version. I believe the plan is to use polonius [1], presumably as an "optional" feature so they can build a stage 1 without it, use that to build polonius, then build the final compiler with it included.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius

E.g. there you may just stop using current borrow-checker and switch to Polonius.

The borrow checker is too dumb (https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius) fixes a lot of this.

It looks like an official borrow checker implementation called Polonius uses it as a dependency, so it makes sense: https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius/blob/981785c101b68ff54...

If you click around a little, you end up on a blog post with this tidbit:

> This project got put together rather suddenly, in response to some work the Rust folks are doing[1] on their new and improved borrow checker.

I don't think I could tell you more than "Frank wrote it to help rust folks who were previously doing work with differential-dataflow directly."

1. https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius/pull/36#issuecomment-3...

Good news is that there's also works going on to relax the restrictions, like polonius. But it seems that it still have a long way to go before it can land in stable Rust...

GCC-rs isn't intended for bootstrapping, it is intended to be an actual fully featured Rust compiler in the future, mrustc is a Rust compiler intended for bootstrapping though. GCC-rs is still very early targeting an older version of the reference compiler without things like a borrow checker, but that's not going to be the case forever. The GCC-rs folks have expressed interest in re-using the borrow checker library used by the reference compiler called polonius enabling them to relatively easily add borrow checking.