Python 3 Will Fly Like An Unladen Swallow

Pythonistas all know about Unladen Swallow, the blazingly fast heavily optimized implementation of Python. It’s sponsored by Google¹ and used extensively internally as well as in the App Engine. Like App Engine itself, it’s limited to Python 2.5, which is annoying at best for those of us who really love Py3k.

A couple days ago, I stumbled onto a post by Jesse Noller that had some really great news. Unladen Swallow is going to be merged into the Py3k branch!

…a PEP is coming, proposing Unladen Swallow be merged back to Python-core – specifically, the Python 3k branch. Yeah, that’s right – a PEP to merge Unladen Swallow back into the mothership, but to Py3k only. Talk about a shot in the arm!²

Back when I worked at Oregon DEQ, I programmed a stream temperature modeling application in Python³ and was forced to create C modules of many functions that were just too slow when run 14,000 times in a row. Unladen Swallow and Py3k would make that kind of necessity nearly vanish. This is definitely something to look forward to.

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1. well, maybe not. We can at least say that it’s “encouraged” [↩]
2. via jessenoller.com – Unladen Swallow: Python 3’s Best Feature. [↩]
3. actually, I was re-programming spaghetti-code Visual Basic extension to Excel… unfortunately, we had to keep the Excel interface. I’m working on that [↩]

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