SAsandGorgon·Dec 11, 2017Submission
Python 3-to-2 backport Tauthon is now up to date with 2.7.14
2 points · Open discussionnaftaliharris
tauthon
Python2016–2024
naftaliharris / tauthon
tauthon
Fork of Python 2.7 with new syntax, builtins, and libraries backported from Python 3.
37Distinct people
56Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
692GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Fork of Python 2.7 with new syntax, builtins, and libraries backported from Python 3.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:56:20 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year56 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-11-27 13:29:09 UTC to 2024-11-25 22:31:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 2 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 2 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 1 | 13 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
12 sourcesHow do you feel about this:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
In Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014)>Python 2 is going to be abandoned in 2020.
But Python 2 is Free Software, so as long as people like it, they can keep improving it:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
In Show HN: Python-to-Python compiler for some 3.6 features in older versionsThis is another python 2 fork that reading this reminded me of: https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
In Google will kill Python 3, and it might be a good thingYes, Tauthon. (https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon).
It lets people with Python 2 code start to use new features from Python 3. (It's a backwards-compatible fork of Python 2.7 with features like async/await, function annotations, and keyword-only arguments backported from Python 3).
In Ask HN: Have you created a programming language and why?There's a fork that was featured on HN a while back, called python2.8 back then, now apparently it's https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
(FTR I'm one of the folks that think Python 3 is an improvement over Python 2 but we still have a monster 2.7 code base that won't be ported any time soon).
In What happened to Python?The unofficial python 2.8 is here:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon
In Python past, present, and future with Guido van Rossum [audio]Unofficial Python 2.8 to be called tauthon
2 points · Open discussion(I'm the primary author of this interpreter).
> Backporting features will be hard
It's actually pretty straightforward: I just find the relevant changes in the Python 3 history, and apply them to Python 2. Usually a handful of things have changed between 2 and 3, so I typically can't just pipe the diff to "git apply -3", but frankly backporting features is more tedious than difficult. If you're interested, for example, here's my recent implementation of the "nonlocal" keyword; you can see the commit messages reference the Python 3 commits: https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder/pull/60
> Why try to create an inferior python 3?
The ultimate goal is to build an interpreter that can run both Python 2 and 3 code. Unfortunately, there is some code that runs and has different behavior under Python 2 and Python 3 (e.g., 'print("a", "b")' )
Read the rest
, so anyone who wants to write an interpreter that can run both kinds of code will need to decide what to do there. I decided to defer to Python 2 behavior in those cases, since most of my code is in Python 2 and I don't want to change it. :-)
Because some people are hateful by nature and see Guido as Satan incarnate for "hating Python 2".
And no, I'm not exaggerating, you just need to look at the comments:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder/issues/47#issue...
I read through that thread the other day and it breaks my heart to know that there are people who think like that. Honestly.
On various occasions I've reasoned (and not reasoned) with the most absurd people, there is always some way to understand where the craziest of logic comes from. But here, I'm just sad.
And I'm especially sad because I've seen similar comments on HN (even just the other day). So really, this goes out to anyone who works in tech and feels like this either about Python or about any open source project: Treat your FOSS maintainers with some human decency.
It's not the first time I say it, and
Read the rest
every time I say it there's always some people nodding at this; "oh yes, of course, well who acts like that really?", those same people turning around a week later, flaming Lennart Poettering for whatever software du jour the guy wrote.
sighs
I'm glad Guido considers this a toy. Anyone interested in helping out the github repo is here:
https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder
In Python 2.8?It already exists, as a Python2 fork: https://github.com/naftaliharris/placeholder
In Removing Python 2.x support from Django for version 2.0