Open Stack

On 2023-09-19 17:38:42 +0530 (+0530), Gk Gk wrote:
> Is there any discussion going on among the developers or architects of this
> community to change the coding language from Python to Go in the near
> future by any chance ? Or, are there any such suggestions from the
> community so far,  given the better speed of Go over Python in execution
> times ?

Not really, no. Completely rewriting software in a different
language is a massive undertaking, and when you consider it's taken
13 years to build the software to its current state that's a lot to
rewrite from scratch. There was, at one point, an attempt to replace
a performance-critical subservice of Swift with something written in
Go (called Hummingbird), and while that plan seemed to hold promise
the work on integrating it eventually dried up. Perhaps someone from
that team can speak more to the reasons it didn't take off (pun
intended).

Keep in mind that most of OpenStack's own software is often not in
performance-critical paths, it frequently calls out to other
programs in userspace that are already written in "faster"
languages, so the relative slowness of the Python parts of that
system doesn't necessarily create much additional overhead anyway,
therefore the benefits of rewriting them might not always be as
great as you anticipate. It comes down to a cost vs. benefit ratio,
where the cost of rewriting is very high and the benefits aren't, or
can't clearly be proven as, good enough to outweigh those costs.

Python (well, the popular CPython interpreter anyway) is itself
getting faster too, it's just not been a high priority for their
community until the last few years, but more recently they've
invested a lot of effort in making efficiency and performance
improvements. Take a look at the speed improvements which came out
of the Faster CPython effort in 3.10 and 3.11 as well as the 3.12
release candidates for example, or the free-threading/no-GIL work
for PEP 703. Why rewrite everything into a faster language when you
could instead just make the language it's already written in faster
instead?
-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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