Status of the project ?

[sametmax]

After the death of pyston, the community, which had great hopes for pyjion, is starting to feel nervous about the future of pyjion. The repository is not very active, and little communication is made of it.

Pyjion is cited as the most promising attempt to speed up Python on HN, /r/python, twitter regularly, so enthusiasm is here.

So how is it going on ? Be honest. We all can understand people at MS have many important things to do and nobody would blame you if you couldn't work on it.

On the other hand, if you need help (money, people) to carry on, we could spread the word.

[ethanhs]

This was asked in #206. Brett added this to the Readme:

This is a side project at work for the project maintainers, and so progress can be sporadic. In spite of that we do accept contributions at any time and will attempt to respond to them promptly.

And said

Basically development is still infrequent based on when we have time, but we can at least start making progress again.

So based on what Brett has said, I can surmise that more help from other people is appreciated, and that they (Brett and Dino) can work on it, but they need time to do so.

[brettcannon]

@ethanhs is right. Basically @DinoV and I work on this when we have spare time at work. This is a total unknown as we're both busy with stuff at the moment and I have no idea when we will get a decent chunk of time to ramp work back up.

But we will happily put in the time to review PRs if people submit them. So one way to view the project is that we as project maintainers are literally maintaining it by reviewing PRs but do not have the time to push it forward at the moment.

[davidkhess]

@brettcannon has any thought been given to setting up a Patreon in order to sponsor some full-time work on this?

Evan You (of Vue.js) successfully did it: https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

I would definitely contribute and spread the word about it.

[brettcannon]

@davidkhess nope because I'm happy with my full-time employment. 😄

[davidkhess]

Glad to hear it!

But I wasn't assuming you. It could be anybody that the maintainers trust and vet, right?

[brettcannon]

Sure, if someone showed we could trust them then we could give them commit rights. How they choose to fund their time working on Pyjion is totally up to them.

[davidkhess]

If the funding effort was sponsored by the maintainers, I think it might attract more attention, lend more credibility and make it more likely that someone might step forward. At the least, it would buy you guys beers for when you can fit in an occasional sprint. :-)

I guess I'm just trying to say that money can make things happen in various ways and I think many of us are willing to provide it.

[sametmax]

I would contribute money, and know a few people that would as well. Having an official page for that would be useful.

But I doubt very much anybody would match the profile to work on this other than you. It requires:

• deep knowledge of Python;
• deep knowledge of CPython internals (and hence C);
• deep knowledge of the .NET JIT (and JIT in general);
• be available and willing to work on this.

That's a lot of conditions.

[davidkhess]

It might make a good internship for a sharp grad student who wants to make something like this their thesis. Speaking out of turn for the maintainers, I would imagine they would be willing to provide needed guidance.