The discussion centers on the death of Python contributor Tim Peters, with widespread tributes to his technical legacy like Timsort and the Zen of Python clashing with heated disagreements over his controversial suspension by the Python Software Foundation. While many users urge focusing solely on his contributions, others argue that ignoring the PSF's handling of his ban is a disservice to his memory and an endorsement of flawed community governance.
189 readable replies · Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · Supporting reply 3 · Supporting reply 4python
cpython
Python2014–2026
python / cpython
cpython
The Python programming language
400Distinct people
547Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
78.2KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The Python programming language
GitHub
Where it is used
- AWS Lambda — AWS Lambda provides a managed runtime and container base image for Python 3.11 that runs on CPython’s interpreter improvements. It uses CPython’s specialization adaptive interpreter features to improve Lambda workloads’ performance. Source
- abridging clinical conversations using python — “In addition to the above-mentioned instances, we also use Python widely in conjunction with several Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services and to set up other monitoring and debugging tools.” Source
- 4 more documented examples
What people are saying
I love the description in the draft PR: 'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the code Not a core dev was merging, not even Guido; The CI was spun on the PRs with…
divbzero used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
Favorable Commenters discuss Tim Peters' contributions to CPython, including int-to-str conversion and Timsort. The tone is respectful and appreciative of his technical achievements.
This week’s discussion is favorable. This is not a standing endorsement. Read the supporting reply
Also in these discussions
- golang/go · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- nodejs/node · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- ruby/ruby · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Favorable
Commenters discuss Tim Peters' contributions to CPython, including int-to-str conversion and Timsort. The tone is respectful and appreciative of his technical achievements.
Supporting reply 1 · Supporting reply 2 · 2 discussions summarized
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
Read the discussion on HN. A full-thread summary is not available yet.
Showing the three threads with the most distinct people linking this repo, from 5 threads this week.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year547 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-12-30 12:04:55 UTC to 2026-10-27 17:34:51 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 20 | 2 | 18 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 36 | 4 | 32 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 28 | 2 | 26 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 33 | 4 | 29 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 54 | 2 | 52 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 62 | 3 | 59 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 63 | 6 | 57 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 64 | 4 | 60 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 70 | 6 | 64 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 72 | 6 | 66 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 40 | 5 | 35 |
What Hacker News says
54 sourcesOEoefrha·Dec 31, 2020
PyCon totally does affect python.tar.gz.
https://github.com/python/cpython/pulls?q=+label%3Asprint (and that link doesn’t capture the PEPs hashed out among other things.)
Also, why the hell make a new account for each comment?
In PyPy Project looking for sponsorship to add support for Apple Silicon> And of course, Apple is not investing in these ports
What count as "investing in these ports"? Does submitting patches to CPython (and many other open source projects, including NumPy) for macOS 11 and Apple Silicon count? Here's a list of Apple-submitted PRs on python/cpython: https://github.com/python/cpython/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Al... Also some co-authored patches excluded by the search. See https://bugs.python.org/issue41100 for more related PRs. Your subsequent comments about IBM seem to imply that these do count.
I'm also curious about who's "we" in "we reached out to the python community about wheels and arm64".
---
Edit: Forgot to say, arm wheels have been supported for many years now (not sure about the specific timeline of aarch64 support, but if 32-bit arm was supported I don't see why aarch64 wouldn't be). Maybe most famo
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usly there's https://www.piwheels.org/ for RPis. Are you talking about aarch64 support on PyPI/warehouse?
He did, in fact, misspeak. functools is part of the standard library, and was part of the standard library in 3.0, and contained reduce: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.0/Lib/functools.py#...
What he meant to say is that it's removed from the list of builtins.
In In CPython, types implemented in C are part of the type treePython's developers must have enormous heads if that's the case: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/b8fde8b5418b75d2935d0...
In Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions.There are fast-paths for these cases, like this one: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/4b8cdfcb22fbeaab9d954... (and note the comment above it about integer addition!)
But the cpython folk make understandability an explicit goal of the codebase which tends to preclude things like fancy optimisations or JITs
In How the Python object system worksThanks. So it seems both were updated with 'key' at the same time: https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/871934d4cf00687b3d1...
Now I'm wondering - what is the point of the python version, if it will always be overridden by the C implementation? Are there circumstances (platforms, compile flags, ...) under which the C version would be unavailable when the python runtime is compiled?
In Using Python's Bisect ModuleThe C version is in Modules/_bisectmodule.c, whereas the Python version is in Lib/bisect.py.
Python version: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/bisect.py
C version: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Modules/_bisec...
In Using Python's Bisect ModuleGuido van Rossum's series on PEG parsing
https://medium.com/@gvanrossum_83706/peg-parsing-series-de5d...
Proposal to use PEG parser in python
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0617/
Python PEG grammar
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.9/Grammar/python.gr...
In Packrat Parsing: Simple, Powerful, Lazy, Linear Time [pdf]Although cPython and Redis hashtables are both implemented in C. cPython's open addressing based hashtable[1] is far superior to the simple chaining based hashtable[2] in Redis. Python's performance is heavily dependent on the performance of its hash table implementation that it has been optimized over and over decades now.
[1]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Objects/dictob...
[2]: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src/dict.c
In Pydis – Redis clone in 250 lines of Python, for performance comparisonYeah, and the source for `nested` is a lot easier to follow than ExitStack. Conceptually it's the same as mine, but with a loop rather than recursion, and it'll yield values (not hard to do with a recursive one, I just didn't feel like it): https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/2.7/Lib/contextlib.py...
Seems like the __new__/__init__ issues exist with ExitStack as well, unlike with `with a, b, c`? So it's not really resolved / improved behaviorally, though ExitStack does have a few new uses (e.g. managing non-context-manager resources).
In On the Beauty of Python's ExitStack (2015)Though I very much like that this exists, and the documentation for contextlib describes its need and use very well[1], I do want to point out that this has always been possible with a tiny bit of recursive glue code like this[2], which works fine even in python 2:
@contextmanager
def multi(*cms):
if len(cms) > 0:
with cms[0]:
with multi(*cms[1:]):
yield
else:
yield
# use with 0..N items, it behaves the same
with multi(...):
pass
Prior to finding ExitStack, I've frequently seen people either give up and do something obviously wrong, or try to manually manage their own stack of __enter__ and __exit__ funcs (which works, but exception handling is non-obvious and often loses useful info). Personally I prefer the recursive route, since it very obviously behaves the sam
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e as if you wrote the nesting out by hand. It even retains accurate stack traces "naturally", unlike most non-ExitStack tactics I've seen through the years. ExitStack's stack-correcting tactic is... a bit more "interesting"[3], though AFAIK it achieves roughly the same stack trace in the end.
Since ExitStack exists, and is likely more efficient (by how much, I have no idea), it's probably a better choice for most situations. And it's just broadly a bit nicer for things that yield resources.
It's always worth browsing stdlib documentation to find gems like this, there are quite a few neat things in most languages that seem fairly unknown.
[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/contextlib.html#supporting...
[2]: https://repl.it/@Groxx/TepidRosybrownLocatorprogram#main.py
[3]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/contextlib...
In fact, that's exactly how Python implements UNARY_NEGATIVE: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/v3.9.0/Python/ceval.c...
If you look a bit further down in the original article, you'll see that the BINARY_ADD instruction does something similar. It pops (a pointer to) the first operand, and modifies (a pointer to) the second one in-place.
Semantically, it makes sense to define operations as popping the operand(s) and pushing a result, for simplicity. But there's no reason the interpreter has to actually be implemented that way, as long as the observable behavior is the same.
In any case, I wouldn't be surprised if an extra push/pop ended up having very little performance impact. The compiler might be able to optimize away the pointer increment/decrement instructions, and if not, the stack pointer is pretty much guaranteed to be in the
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L1 cache.
Direct threading is in here https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0564aafb71a153dd0aca4...
In Pyston v2: Faster Pythonit's _still_ essentially the same switch(opcode) based interpreter it was 20 years ago. no threading, no super instructions, no jitting, nothing.
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Python/ceval.c...
In Pyston v2: Faster PythonShowing the 15 most recent of 54 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.