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
70 sourcesZIzitterbewegung·Dec 26, 2024
Dang: Link should be https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/86904
In Subprocess: Don't close all file descriptors by default (close_fds=False)I'm not seeing python creating a self-pipe for `loop.add_signal_handler`.
edit: Oh, it uses `signal.set_wakeup_fd`, interesting.
https://docs.python.org/3/library/signal.html#signal.set_wak...
edit2: it looks like the fd comes from a self-socket, but yeah, it's the same approach. The function is even called `_make_self_pipe`.
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/bf21e2160d1dc6869fb23...
In The GNU make jobserver Implementation (2015)and it's back now. No incidents reported on status.python.org.
there was some discussion on at least two github issues: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/127307 and https://github.com/python/pythondotorg/issues/2663
In All Python Downloads from Python.org Return 403 ForbiddenPython also detects this situation (at runtime using refcounts) and does in-place mutations where possible https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/a2ee89968299fc4f0da4b...
In Owl Lisp – A functional Scheme for world dominationThere’s a nasty bug in the python cookie parser, cookies after a cookie with quotes will be dropped: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/113663
Zoom or some other website our customers use was writing a cookie with quotes that would break the site. Amazingly hard to reproduce and debug.
In Handling cookies is a minefieldI went and dug up the original code that caused an issue. Here it is:
https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/v2.7.1/Lib/cgi.py#L60...
Python's std lib `cgi.FieldStorage` object was falsy if it did not define any headers, even if it contained file data.
Thus my conditional trying to check whether a file was being uploaded "if request.field_storage" was going through the False branch when files were being uploaded but only in certain header-free scenarios not covered by automated and manual testing. This resulted in us dropping user data on the floor and losing uploaded files for a very large number of users before we realized and shut it off
The other sibling post contains another example where people may be confused, and Google pulls up others. But this is the concrete case that caused us to send out a hundred thousand apology emails to a
Read the rest
ffected customers after losing their files
The issue was migrated to github so more up-to-date discussion is in https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/62817
In RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrentFor simple loops, yes, I also found that 3.13 is roughly equivalent to 3.12. Both are much slower than 3.11, though [0] – roughly 6-9% for lists, and in one weird edge case, 57% slower for array.array, but only on MacOS (I only tested ARM, no idea on x86). Linux was about the same as for lists.
[0]: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/123540
In Python 3.13, what didn't make the headlinesPython also has it. You can call async code with `asyncio.run` but it is extremely limited by the fact that nested event loops are prohibited. Any function that uses it becomes extremely brittle because it can't be called from async functions unlike all other synchronous code.
This is for the most part an intentional design decision to "make sure that when the user is already in async code they don't call the sync form out of laziness." [1]
[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/66435#issuecomment-...
In What Color is Your Function? (2015)I've always wanted to give IPv6 more chances to see if I can take advantage of its features early, but every attempt has left me very disappointed. Issues I noticed during my recent research:
- GitHub does not support IPv6.
- Docker containers do not have IPv6 by default.
- Many programs default to listening on 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 when they start, which means they only listen on IPv4. On Linux, listening on :: defaults to listening on both IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously, but few programs do this. Python asyncio even disabled this feature[1].
- I've always heard that using IPv6 can sometimes lead to high latency or low bandwidth on certain websites, or even resource loading failures. Why isn’t there a convenient tool to compare these differences? It would be great if browsers could switch between IPv4-only, IPv6-only, and dual-stack modes.
Read the rest
I’d like to seriously compare the effects on some websites rather than being silently affected.
- Two large ISPs, Hurricane Electric and Cogent, do not have IPv6 peering[2], so they are not interconnected, and many other ISPs have similar issues.
- Very few VPS providers offer /64 IPv6 addresses, which would allow different containers to be assigned freely within a machine. Some only provide a single /128, while others offer very few addresses per machine.
- Many people might only know how to use iptables/nftables for firewalls and forget about IPv6, leading to situations where using IPv6 can bypass the firewall. I’m not talking about issues caused by the lack of NAT (NAT is not a good firewall!), but more generally about cases where you want to disable forwarding between two network interfaces.
I stumbled upon two old posts that I found quite amusing:
In 2011, someone said[3] “It's not terribly useful to have IPv6 only websites at the moment. Check back in 5-10 years though ;)”
In 2014, someone said[4] “The Internet is growing really fast, in a few years, the IPv6 network will be bigger than IPv4, so, with IPv4, you'll be out of the real Internet. Go ahead man! Upgrade your IP!! Change is a good thing.”
[1]: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/5f5c0b9c23238dc0a1fdb...
[2]: https://adminhacks.com/broken-IPv6.html
[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/gnh69/what_ipv6only_w...
[4]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/309461/how-to-disable-ipv6-p...
> The new REPL released in Python 3.13 aims to provide modern features
No `vi` mode and not planned. Very modern.
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/118840
In PEP 762 – REPL-acing the default REPLIf you heavily rely on the Python standard library, then you’re using a lot of Python code that doesn’t call out to C extensions. Peruse the standard library code, if you want to get a sense of it: https://github.com/python/cpython/tree/main/Lib
So you can expect any code that heavily relies on the standard library to be slower than the Rust equivalent.
A purely interpreted language implementation (not JIT’d) like CPython is almost always going to have a 10x-100x slowdown compared to equivalent code in C/C++/Rust/Go or most other compiled/JIT’d languages. So unless your program spends the vast majority of time in C extensions, it will be much slower.
In My negative views on Rust (2023)I've been tracking this one: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/109534, but there are multiple others raised in the cpython repo over on Github. Searching for asyncio or sslcontext shows multiple issues raised over the years with no fix in place.
In Python 3.13.0 Is Releasednot just this one, I've been tracking this too
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/109534
In Python 3.13.0 Is ReleasedShowing the 15 most recent of 70 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.