What if Python was natively distributable?

Posted by bzurak 3 days ago

What if Python was natively distributable?(medium.com)

45 points | 20 comments

schmichael 5 minutes ago|

Absolutely wild to see none of the long lineage of similar attempts mentioned here. The earliest I could find with a quick search was Pyro which started in 1998 and still seems to be going: https://pyro4.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

RPyC came along in the aughts. There's a long history of "transparent clustering and rpc" efforts in Python that could be used or drawn on.

Sad to see that history ignored here.

MomsAVoxell 2 hours ago||

I ask this question, but instead: I ask it of Lua.

As in, what if there was a Linux distro that focused, primarily, on building a Lua layer on top of everything, system-wise. Just replace all the standard stuff with one single, system-friendly language: Lua. C/C++ everything as it currently is: put Lua on top all the way to the Desktop.

It’s only a thought experiment, except there are cases where I can see a way to use it, and in fact have done it, only not to the desktop, such as of course embedded. Realtime data collection, processing and management. In this case, it is superlative to have a single system/app language on top of C/C++.

So I think there may be a point in the future where this ‘single language for everything’ becomes a mantra in distro land. I see the immense benefit.

Lua table state can be easily transferred, give or take a bit of resource management vis a vis sync’ing state and restoring it appropriately. Lua Bytecode, itself, in a properly defined manner can serve as a perfectly cromulant wire spec. Do it properly and nobody will ever know it isn’t just a plain ol’ C struct on an event handler, one of the fastest, except it’ll be very well abstracted to the application.

Oh, and if things are doing bytecode, may as well have playback and transactions intrinsically… it is all, after all, just a stream.

App state as gstreamer plugin? Within grasp, imho…

interiorchurch 11 minutes ago||

There used to be a roguelike game called Angband, which was written in C. There was a vibrant community around it, many of whom produced Angband variants by hacking the text config files and the C code. One developer got the idea of making most of the game scriptable in Lua, over a C core; which would, in theory, make even more people be able to hack at the game and produce variants.

What happened was the Angband community imploded, and the number of variants went way down.

I don't know if this is a generalizable example and there may have been other factors at work, but it is a cautionary tale.

Angband is still around btw, and is still excellent. But I believe it's C and text config files again now.

Lvl999Noob 1 hour ago|||

Wouldn't you face the same problem as Dotnet on Windows? AFAIK, dotnet based frameworks and apps suffered from huge performance issues. It might have improved in recent times, I am not actually a windows dev.

If just the end user application is in Lua, then maybe it's fine and the high level language slowdown won't matter. If you want to wrap the low level kernel APIs etc in a high level language as the canonical interface, I would be very skeptical.

MomsAVoxell 1 hour ago||

I’m not sure the ‘language slowdown’ is as significant as one might think, given the common shared libs that would be in place with a one-size-fits-all solution, but its really all just a dream until someone does it, anyway.

mikkupikku 1 hour ago|||

Do it. Build on the work of AwesomeWM probably, it's a Lua focused window manager that's quite nice. You can also build up less "minimalist" widgets and whatnot using Lua and claude code, which is very good at unconventional GUI work in Lua. I can attest to this specifically, I've had it build numerous GUIs with mpv Lua userscripts.

hnax 1 hour ago||

100%

ericreg92 2 hours ago||

Whats curious to me here is that the github repo linked to in the article seems to exactly recreate the "operating system" that is called an "opinion in the wrong layer".

Perhaps I am misunderstanding this, but after looking at the code what exactly are we achieving here over other frameworks? The repo is obviously very new (and the author certainly seems busy), so perhaps a better question is what do we aim to achieve? So far it seems like the exact same pattern with some catchy naming.

Regardless, I love ambitious projects furiously coded by one crazy person. And I mean "crazy" in the best sense of the word, not as an insult. This is what open source is all about.

Please prove us all wrong. If you fail, you'll learn a ton!

lelanthran 1 hour ago|

> Regardless, I love ambitious projects furiously coded by one crazy person.

Me too; the world lost a treasure, once.

RIP Terry Davis. There was so much to be learned from your approach.

kimi 13 minutes ago||

Answering the question: it would be called "the Erlang VM", and you'd use Elixir to program it.

https://elixir-lang.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mix_otp/10.html

lelanthran 1 hour ago||

Pah - all these newcomers with interpreted/bytecode languages for remote functions!

It's easy to send text or bytecode to another instance of your runtime. I did a distributed system sending native code functions to be executed remotely.

Fair enough, it was for academic purposes, but it worked[1].

-------------------------------------

[1] By "worked" I mean got a passing grade on a thesis that got an IMDB number. Probably still got the actual PDF somewhere, or maybe it was indexed by google at some point.

blopker 1 hour ago||

Every time I see something like this (turn function calls into a network call), I reflect fondly on the list of fallacies in distributed computing [0]. These are issues that largely have to be handled in an application-specific way, and cannot be solved in the general case.

This list alone has saved me many late debugging nights, just by not making or using systems that ignore the list.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...

rao-v 1 hour ago|

I generally agree but I value projects like this because there are smaller scale environments where many of these fallacies are perfectly fine working hypotheses. My home lab or a low volume, low 9s service etc.

mohamedkoubaa 3 hours ago||

The distributed object fallacy is never going away, is it?

https://martinfowler.com/articles/distributed-objects-micros...

hosh 1 hour ago||

Meanwhile, in BEAM land, this is a solved problem, and just watching different languages converge into towards the set of primitives and constraints. It is hard to replicate BEAM’s premptive scheduler, but I would not be surprised if someone will end up thinking they invented something novel by adding queues (mailboxes), or failing that, something like go channels.

And even then, once you have a workable set of primitives, it turns out that there are some orchestration patterns that recurs over and over again, so people will converge towards OTP once the primitives are there.

petcat 2 hours ago||

I don't have much experience with this kind of thing, but from here it looks like a program written this way would be nearly impossible to reason about performance when something as simple as a function call in your Python interpreter can have wild fluctuations in predictability just due to underlying network latency, remote host saturation, etc.

It seems like you would need an entire observability framework built and instrumented on top of this to ever really be that useful.

extr 1 hour ago|

LLM generated article.

jjtheblunt 47 minutes ago|

I wonder if an LLM generated article would get the title to use proper English, though: "What if Python were natively distributable?".

It's possible LLMs pick up improper English, of course, since proper is some measure of what used to be a norm, but may presently be perceived as outdated.