Who would like Rust in CPython 3.15?
@emmatyping and Kirill Podoprigora "propose introducing the Rust programming language to CPython. Rust will initially only be allowed for writing optional extension modules, but eventually will become a required dependency of CPython and allowed to be used throughout the CPython code base."
https://discuss.python.org/t/pre-pep-rust-for-cpython/104906
@hugovk @emmatyping It's nice but building all of CPython on a local machine takes like 2 minutes, my experience with Rust is that it does NOT compile that quickly.
@pganssle @hugovk @emmatyping Are you doing a lot of fresh compiles (as opposed to incremental)? Lifetimes are my biggest pain point when switching from python to rust, but we're mostly using incremental and `cargo check`. There's some tricks to optimize compile times, but it's kinda limited.
@konstin @hugovk @emmatyping I haven't written much Rust in a long time (I don't write nearly as much code in my free time as I used to, not that I soured on the language), so I cant say if things have changed much. I do remember incremental builds being reasonably fast.
That said, while fast incremental builds are an *absolute must* (because basically everyone iterates), slow fresh builds are still a problem because they're hugely discouraging for drive-by contributions (plus if we don't get pre-built binaries for non-Windows platforms, stuff like `pyenv` will be way more annoying).
@konstin @hugovk @emmatyping Also, even without ever doing a "make clean" on CPython, for a project that active, if you work on stuff every few weeks or months the chances that your first build will be slow go up by a lot.
The irony being that much of the CPython build time (at least on a decently multi-core machine) is due not to the C compiler, but to the painfully obsolete autotools-based configure machinery.
@pganssle @hugovk @emmatyping I have a sneaking suspicion the arguments are going to be compatibility/compile-time/learning-something-new versus safety/recruiting-new-core-devs-for-non-Python-bits