Google have released an open source project on GitHub called Grumpy that converts Python to Go, and then compiles it down to native code.
It’s an interesting development, but since they won’t be supporting C extension modules (which basically rules out all the scientific and machine learning libraries I use), it means I probably won’t end up using this new tool too much.
Google announced the project on their blog a week ago, citing how:
- The YouTube front-end and YouTube API currently runs on CPython 2.7
- This code serves millions of request every second
- Grumpy can serve as a replacement to swap in for most pure Python projects
- Grumpy is not restricted by Python’s global interpreter lock (GIL)
- Grumpy should be faster than CPython executed code
If you have a pure Python project you want to speed up, or want to switch a large code-base to Go, then it might be worth checking out.
