Python 3.14 compiled to metal – no interpreter

by hamza_q_ • 16 days ago

151 129 16 days ago

ubercore6• 16 days ago

I hate to be that guy, but... one week old project, clear signs of vibing. I will be shocked if the remaining work listed (cpython test suite) proceeds in any reasonable timeline.

This is a pretty hard problem to just solve in a week.

EDIT: and man, these kind of comments LLM created comments are really starting to grind my gears as my job slowly turns into reviewing LLM PRs:

Known gaps at the language level are burned down through the ratcheted floors above — the committed floor files, not this README, are the authoritative compatibility baseline.

baq• 16 days ago

of course it is vibed.

it doesn't matter as long as it works.

ActionHank• 16 days ago

That's the neat part, when it's vibed it works, until it doesn't and then it's really hard to make it work again.

kameit00• 16 days ago

In 12 months… vibe code mess. Or discontinued. Or both.

mcphage• 16 days ago

Given the stdlib modules listed as "explicitly not done yet", I'm going to say: it doesn't yet, in any meaningful sense. The question then becomes: how confident do we feel that it will work in the near future?

nozzlegear4• 16 days ago

it doesn't matter as long as it works.

I think the clankers would call this a "load bearing statement".

getpokedagain3• 16 days ago

Something working is pointless if there are no users and no need is being addressed.

himata4113• 16 days ago

This is written by fable with the guidance of a very experienced, highly skilled person. See their previous work.

throwaway27448• 16 days ago

Experience doesn't change the fundamental problem. I don't see this project going anywhere for general use beyond their needs.

Dilettante_• 16 days ago

"Very experienced" might mean different things to you. The oldest repo on their GH is from 2017. As for highly skilled: Could you point closer to which parts of their portfolio we are supposed to be awestruck by?

roger_• 16 days ago

This guy is behind the awesome Oh My Pi agent, so I’d give him a chance.

thx672• 16 days ago

These tics are fairly easy to remove via hooks and prompts, but once the codebase is infected, it is 10x as much work to get the agents to stop.

westurner• 16 days ago

How does performance compare to RustPython compiled in a similar way?

cuzezzzbbfofai• 16 days ago

Can it run Numpy and Torch?

smithza2• 16 days ago

pickle files are usually the limiter here. I would be surprised if it can handle pickle files since it relies so much on runtime LUTs of the objects and arbitrary object definitions. This usually doesn't work in other use cases such as swig or cython either IIRC.

cdavid• 16 days ago

For NumPy/Pytorch, the C API is much bigger issue than pickle. I have not looked at the architecture of this, but given it uses its own IR + replaces ref counting w/ a GC, I am assuming it does not have C API compatibility.

echoangle• 16 days ago

What happens if you call exec/eval? Are they just not available?

smithza2• 16 days ago

this as well as pickle files will likely be unavailable

leobuskin5• 16 days ago

It uses JIT

skeledrew3• 16 days ago

Also getattr/setattr, the magic methods, etc. I imagine this dead on arrival.

leobuskin5• 16 days ago

A few problems with this Fable's project:

1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances;

2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance;

3. It will die the same way as dozens of similar (even non-AI projects) died before, and reasons will be the same: (1) and (2).

subarctic• 16 days ago

"Without ai assistance" - ok, but what about with ai assistance?

zahlman• 16 days ago

For a project like this, relying on AI assistance also makes it effectively dead in the water.

leobuskin5• 16 days ago

It's possible, but we're at the moment when most of us can ask Fable to implement a custom compiler to a custom target for our favorite language, and even use it as a part of custom solution. Why do I need someone else's implementation? Where's the magic in this project? What's the secret sauce?

bt1a• 16 days ago

it will be impossible to maintain parity with wetware

up2isomorphism• 16 days ago

Then the question is why? Because that is an another way of saying donating tokens.

rurban• 16 days ago

Reading is hard.

It runs and passes the full cpython testsuite, just 5x faster.

With AI it's 100x easier to maintain than by hand.

It reminds my on pperl. same approach using crane lift. Looks good

ubercore6• 16 days ago

How am I misreading this part of the readme?

What is explicitly not done yet — this is the active roadmap, in order: CPython test suite (cpython-full): the standing grind; failures are clustered and burned down per wave.

leobuskin5• 16 days ago

It passes only curated corpus (snippets), not the full CPython test suite. So, yes, reading is hard. Nothing against AI, btw.

bunderbunder2• 16 days ago

The “status” section of the project’s readme explicitly says that it is not passing the full test suite, and that the AOT compiler passes fewer tests than the JIT one.

It also explicitly says that they’re still working on building out the standard library.

I’m maybe not as pessimistic as leobuskin, but they are absolutely right that this is not the first time someone has tried to build an alternative Python implementation, and that all previous ones have failed because they weren’t able to get close enough to 100% parity to be acceptable to most users. Python is an unusually quirky language. I kind of wonder if “written in Rust” adds an extra headwind here because there’s nothing even remotely memory-safe about Python’s extension mechanism. I don’t know enough to know, but I have read about the death of a few of these projects in the past and a common theme of the post-mortem seems to be, “It went so smoothly at the start that we were caught off guard how much of a brick wall the last 5% was going to be.”

anitil2• 16 days ago

Your reply would have been much better without the first line [0]

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cwillu2• 16 days ago

Reading is hard.

The irony…

TZubiri3• 16 days ago

1. It's not Python by any means, it's a subset with its own runtime, its own quirks and nuances;

A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato

2. It will be impossible to maintain parity with CPython without AI assistance

What does that even mean? If you would have said that it's impossible to update to python 3.15 of further, I'd get it.

geraneum• 16 days ago

A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato

The funny thing about this is not that the first sentence is wrong, which it is. It’s the failed reductio ad absurdum.

skeledrew3• 16 days ago

A subset of python is python. Half a tomato is still tomato

A subset of a calculator is still a calculator, but that subset definitely can't do everything the full version can.

Archit3ch2• 16 days ago

A subset of python is python.

Mojo folks (rightly) disagree.

iLoveOncall• 16 days ago

Can those AI slop projects have a reserved tag on HackerNews? So many in the past few weeks I wouldn't have clicked and wasted my time on if I knew it was just some vibe-coded garbage.

andy99• 16 days ago

I see the same thing, and believe that ironically AI is going to bring about the return of good search engines as we’re currently drowning in slop and need a real way to filter it.

ranger_danger• 16 days ago

How would a search engine filter that out?

RantyDave• 16 days ago

Don't we have Nuitka for this?

LtWorf6• 16 days ago

It's not the same, that one works.

TZubiri3• 16 days ago

that compiles to C presumably, not to machine code

getpokedagain3• 16 days ago

> The project is under heavy active development

Is a pretty oof sentence for a project with one contributor and no users. Just reeks of llm barf with no oversight.

tclancy• 16 days ago

I am a fan of AI assistance, but “ratchet” is pretty much a Claude giveaway. The kids, now in their twenties because the reference is dated, might make a joke here.

frollogaston3• 16 days ago

It says ratchet so much. Yeah that's pretty ratchet. Idk what it even means for some of those usages.

drivebyhooting• 16 days ago

Looks like it still uses python object model. You need auto unboxing for good performance.

dr_kretyn• 16 days ago

Awesome. Not for this repo specifically; more about the trend. More people are realizing that we have such powerful tools at our disposal and will want to do something awesome, worth while with them. Of course, many will fall off after a week, then more after a month, but some will survive. Knowledge will be spread and some will be winners through adoption. Grit can lead to knowledge, and can lead to awesome stuff.

elzbardico• 16 days ago

Seems to be slow as molasses compared to cpython.

bbminner• 16 days ago

If AI can find new proofs for well posed math problems, i see no reason why it shouldn't be able to implement a more performant fully featured version of an existing interpreter (eg with JIT and AOT) that emulates python api well and passes all python tests and tests of other projects. It is true that a lot of human effort and thought has been put into squeezing performance out of the existing implementation. It is true that many people have found that getting that last 1% of python test suite to pass turned out to be insurmountably hard. Same is true for math, and yet AI sometimes finds simple solutions that we somehow missed. Maybe there's a simple optimization that was used in an obscure interpreter of a domain specific language that we never heard of. Worth a shot in my mind. If that turns out to be successful, we should ideally find the code that served "as an inspiration" if any.

It might make more practical sense to start from CPython and try to optimize that further though. It even has a "not fully fleshed out" JIT already.

henry2023• 16 days ago

If humans can find (and have been finding for millennia) new proofs for well posted math problems, I see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to implement a more performant fully featured version of an existing interpreter.

eru2• 16 days ago

They can, and they have been doing so. But humans are expensive. Especially smart humans.

xiaodai• 16 days ago

it's been tried 10 million times. so yeah

Archit3ch2• 16 days ago

Surely this will succeed where $4B Modular failed!

thx672• 16 days ago

A couple of other interesting Python compiler projects recently..

https://github.com/Nonannet/copapy uses copy and patch, discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972392

Single-pass SSA bytecode compiler and threaded-code stack VM for a sandboxed Python subset https://github.com/dylan-sutton-chavez/edge-python

frollogaston3• 16 days ago

Dynamic typing means you don't know the sizes/offsets of things beforehand. The "compiled to metal" thing still resembles a runtime more than your typical compiled code. Like naively, object would be a struct with a hashmap of property names->values since technically you can alter the keys at runtime, and many values will be pointers to other objects. Idiomatic C or Rust code will have flatter structs.

Is it faster than the original interpreter? Maybe if you optimize out the primitives and certain well-known object types, unless you do some more advanced static analysis.

zoom6628• 16 days ago

Mojo not good enough?

piloto_ciego5• 16 days ago

Lol, all the people squawking about how this means nothing and this is a worthless project amuses me. A lot of people just don't see it yet. This is coming for literally everything and it is so exciting. The next decade is going to be awesome.

weregiraffe2• 16 days ago

What's so exciting about your software being made of code nobody can or wants to understand?

piloto_ciego5• 16 days ago

Can you not see how amazing this is?

worldsavior• 16 days ago

You can see it cause...you're a prophet right?

LtWorf6• 16 days ago

The man's called "blind pilot".

piloto_ciego5• 15 days ago

Not a prophet at all, but can you imagine 5 years ago, thinking that this was even possible?

imtringued3• 16 days ago

Most of the value proposition of Python is that it calls into fast native modules. Compiling Python itself helps a little, but it isn't that big of a deal. The most prominent Python JITs have been a failure because of the tight coupling between CPython and native modules.

Basically the entire Python ecosystem has deep integration into implementation details of CPython, if there was a runtime independent api like HPy, then the effort would be better spent migrating to it rather than building yet another half baked JIT.

piloto_ciego5• 15 days ago

This isn’t about Python

rcarmo• 16 days ago

Funny to see it took the same IR approach as I did with https://github.com/rcarmo/go-joker - although I did it somewhat based on the .NET IR and this seems a bit more AI-ish.

Python 3.14 compiled to metal – no interpreter

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