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Posted by networked 8 hours ago

Warn about PyPy being unmaintained(github.com)
185 points | 67 comments
mattip 4 hours ago|
PyPy core dev here. If anyone is interested in helping out, either financially or with coding, we can be reached various ways. See https://pypy.org/contact.html
cfbolztereick 2 hours ago||
PyPy isn't unmaintained. We are certainly fixing bugs and are occasionally improving the jit. However, the remaining core devs (me among them) don't have the capacity to keep up with cpython. So for supporting new cpython versions we'll need new people to step up. For 3.12 this has started, we have a new contributor who is pushing this along.
the_jeremy 5 hours ago||
If anyone else is also barely aware and confused by the similar names, PyPI is the Python Package Index, which is up and maintained. PyPy is "A fast, compliant alternative implementation of Python." which doesn't have enough devs to release a version for 3.12[0].

[0]: https://github.com/orgs/pypy/discussions/5145

darkwater 2 hours ago||
Thanks for the clarification. On top of that, being an issue in the 'uv' GitHub repo (uv installs packages from PyPi) made my brain easily cross the letters.
blahgeek 4 hours ago|||
Reminds me of Cython vs CPython
tpoacher 1 hour ago|||
and mypy is "an optional static type checker for Python" [0]

Given that both pypy (through RPython) and mypy deal with static type checks in some sense, I kept confusing the two projects until recently.

Also, I just learnt (from another comment in this post) about mypyc [1], which seems to complete the circle somehow in my mind.

  [0] https://www.mypy-lang.org/
  [1] https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc
LtWorf 7 minutes ago||
pypy existed long before type annotations were a thing
Muhammad523 5 hours ago|||
Thanks. I knew this already but keep forgetting and getting confused
with 5 hours ago|||
Thanks, I also saw this as PyPI and was confused, lol
chii 4 hours ago||
now somebody just needs to make a PiPy for the raspberry pi
f1shy 2 hours ago|||
Please don’t give ideas
zugi 3 hours ago|||
Is that PiPyPy or PiPyPI?
cjfd 1 hour ago||
The short summary of it being that these people are beyond terrible at giving names to things.
kelvinjps10 1 hour ago||
The python community has the habit of giving short names for things
pansa2 3 hours ago||
PyPy is a fantastic achievement and deserves far more support than it gets. Microsoft’s “Faster CPython” team tried to make Python 5x faster but only achieved ~1.5x in four years - meanwhile PyPy has been running at over 5x faster for decades.

On the other hand, I always got the impression that the main goal of PyPy is to be a research project (on meta-tracing, STM etc) rather than a replacement for CPython in production.

Maybe that, plus the core Python team’s indifference towards non-CPython implementations, is why it doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.

mattip 2 hours ago||
Third party libraries like SciPy scikit-learn, pandas, tensorflow and pytorch have been critical to python’s success. Since CPython is written in C and exposes a nice C API, those libraries can leverage it to quickly move from (slow) python to (fast) C/C++, hitting an optimum between speed of development and speed of runtime.

PyPy’s alternative, CFFI, was not attractive enough for the big players to adopt. And HPy, another alternative that would have played better with Cython and friends came too late in the game, by that time PyPy development had lost momentum.

toxik 2 hours ago||
PyPy on numpy heavy code is often a lot slower than CPython
mattip 54 minutes ago||
Yes. The C API those libraries use is a good fit to CPython, a bad fit to PyPy. Hence CFFI and HPy. Actually, many if the lessons from HPy are making their way into CPython since their JIT and speedups face the same problems as PyPy. See https://github.com/py-ni
grzaks 22 minutes ago||
We have been using PyPy on core system component on production for like 10 years
aragilar 6 hours ago||
Somewhat interesting that "volunteer project no longer under active development" got changed to "unmaintained".
maxloh 5 hours ago||
For context, they have 2 to 4 commits per month since October [1]. The last release was July 2025 [2].

[1]: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/commits/main/

[2]: https://github.com/pypy/pypy/tags

johndough 44 minutes ago||
That seems reasonably active to me. You can't really expect more from an open source project without paid full-time developers.
killingtime74 5 hours ago|||
What euphemism do you prefer then...
aragilar 3 hours ago|||
There's a difference between dead (i.e. "unmaintained") and low activity ("not under active development"). From what I can see PyPy is in the latter category (and being in that category does not mean it's going to die soon), so choosing to claim it is unmaintained is notable.
Hamuko 3 hours ago||
Being three major versions behind CPython is definitely not a great sign for the long-term viability of it.
saghm 3 hours ago||
I'm not sure "major versions" is the most correct term here, but I think your point is spot on
Hamuko 2 hours ago||
For Python, 0.1 increases are major versions and 1.0 increases are cataclysmic shifts.
johndough 1 hour ago||
I don't know about that. For me, f-strings were the last great quality-of-life improvement that I wouldn't want to live without, and those landed in Python 3.6. Everything after that has not really made much of a difference to me.
toyg 46 minutes ago||
That's like saying the last tax that affected you was passed in 2006...
johndough 27 minutes ago||
I don't understand. Could you elaborate?
kev009 5 hours ago|||
Undermaintained might be more suited since it does have life but doesn't appear commercially healthy nor apparently relevant to other communities.
dapperdrake 3 hours ago||
Underphrased like a pro.
electroglyph 3 hours ago||
much respect to the PyPy contributors, but it seems like a pretty fair assessment
swiftcoder 2 hours ago||
9 months since the last major release definitely feels like a short time in which to declare time-of-death on an open source project
LtWorf 4 minutes ago|||
But if you set up dependabot and automerge some crap every couple of days your project will be very active!

Meanwhile my projects got marked as abandoned because those scanners are unaware of codeberg being a thing.

tempay 2 hours ago||||
It’s been a lot longer than that. There was a reasonable sized effort to provide binaries via conda-forge but the users never came. That said, the PyPy devs were always a pleasure to work with.
hobofan 1 hour ago|||
It is also lagging behind in terms of Python releases. They are currently on 3.11, which was released 3.5 years ago for mainline Python.
didip 6 hours ago||
wow, that would be a big shame. I hope many of the useful learnings are already ported to CPython.
mattip 47 minutes ago||
- The pure python repl started off in PyPy, although a lot of work was done to make it ready for prime time by the COython core devs - The lessons from HPy are slowly making their way into CPython, see https://github.com/py-ni - There were many fruitful interactions in fixing subtle bugs in CPython that stemmed from testing the stdlib on an alternative implementation

And more

mkl 5 hours ago||
Almost none of it will have been ported to CPython, as it's a completely different approach.
skissane 4 hours ago||
I really like PyPy’s approach of using a Python dialect (RPython) as the implementation language, instead of C. From a conceptual perspective, it is much more elegant. And there are other C-like Python dialects now too - Cython, mypy’s mypyc. It would be a shame if PyPy dies.
scosman 3 hours ago||
Read as PyPi and almost had heart attack
moktonar 2 hours ago||
Thank you for all the work guys, I’ll see how I can help.
doctorpangloss 5 hours ago||
knowing pypy has good implementations of a lot of behavior it helped me fix multiprocessing in Maya's python interpreter, fixing stuff like torch running inside of Maya.

it's too bad. it is a great project for a million little use cases.

Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago|
@kvinogradov (Open source endowment), I am (Pinging?) you because I think that you may be of help as I remember you stating that within the Open source endowment and the approach of how & which open source projects are better funded[0]

And I think that PyPy might be of interest to the Fund for sponsoring given its close to unmaintained. PyPy is really great in general speeding up Python[1] by magnitudes of order.

Maybe the fund could be of help in order to help paying the maintainer who are underfunded which lead to the situation being unmaintained in the first place. Pinging you because I am interested to hear your response and hopefully, see PyPy having better funding model for its underfunded maintainers.

[0]: https://endowment.dev/about/#model

[1]: https://benjdd.com/languages2/ (Refer to PyPY and Python difference being ~15x)

skissane 4 hours ago||
> @kvinogradov (Open source endowment), I am (Pinging?) you

unfortunately, @-pinging does not work on this site, it does nothing to notify anyone. If you want to get a specific person’s attention, use off-site communication mechanisms

pinkmuffinere 4 hours ago||
HN doesn’t have this sort of pinging behavior :/
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