Location: Cape Town, RSA
  Remote: YES
  Willing to relocate: NO
  Technologies: Python, C, assembler (x86, ARM), C#, unity, C++, JS, kinda anything
  Résumé/CV: -
  Portfolio: PyPy project (https://pypy.org), VR Sketch (https://vrsketch.eu), Building and operating climbing gyms (https://bloc11.co.za)
  Email: fijal at gmail

I'm a curious individual working on a variety of projects. I mostly like intersection of humans and technology, would love to talk to clients, translate that to ideas and what do we actually build. Love prototypes.

Is there a single error bar in the paper? It seems like a guess

Hi Dmitry, Hi Ryan

I love the fact that this is out! I have been the original author of vmprof and I have been working on profilers for quite some time. I'm also one of the people who worked on PyPy. We never managed to launch a SaaS product out of it, but I'm super happy to answer questions about profiling, just in time compilers and all things like that! Hit me here or in private (email in profile)

Hi Maciej,

vmprof is cool! For Python we currently use py-spy. The way it works is it reads certain areas of process's memory to figure out what the current stack is. It's a clever approach that I like because that means you can attach to any process very quickly without installing any additional packages or anything like that. The downside is that from the OS perspective reading another process's memory is often seen as a threat — so on macOS you have to use sudo, and on Linux sometimes you have to take extra steps to allow this kind of cooperation between processes — we already saw people with custom kernels having issues with it.

Going forward we'll definitely experiment with more profilers and over time add support for other ones as well.

I saw you joined our Slack, we'll be happy to chat about profilers at some point :)

Note that py-spy seems problematic in containers—it requires ptrace, which means you need a special capability, and that's a security risk so many environments won't even give people the option to enable it.

In addition to vmprof, pyinstrument is another alternative.

All who live in silicon Valley of course. You seem to have forgotten that "making world a better place" is a mantra repeated across the entire IT. I presume if Facebook employees actively think that, so can RIAA lawyers

That will likely be the contents of the next blog post

It did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

Eh, not really, there's a gulf of inventions involving better pantograph technology, efficient and compact hybrid power trains, sensors and self-driving capability (the trucks will need some form of self 'lane' keeping to stay connected to the power source) and so on that makes the two barely comparable other than at a very cosmetic level.

If you want to see an advanced Python compiler, have a look at PyPy. While CPython bytecode compiler is "dump", it's as smart as it can be. You can do crazy stuff with speculative replacing of bytecodes with guards and type-specific bytecodes, but then you might as well create a full just in time compiler. It's incredibly hard to create optimizations on bytecode level without changing semantics, which Python rightly stayed away from.

Hi

I suggest you don't write down in gray on white "by the way, we will also store your email". Put it somewhere either prominent or maybe outright have and opt in button for that? It's an industry wide practice, but that does not automatically make it ok.

Thanks. I'll get that sorted out.

Thanks!

I'm glad to hear your company is also incorporated in Estonia. How well has it been working for you?

It has been a great choice. I've incorporated companies in multiple countries before, and Estonia has been by far the best. Easy, unbureaucratic, extremely competent, they speak great English and are always very pro-active and helpful. We work with the guys from LeapIN and it has been a great and pleasant experience since day 0.

Plus... That GDPR thing across the pond.. we (on this side of the pond) don't appreciate this behaviour. Ask us politely to tick a (previously unchecked checkbox).

I started out thinking "whoah that should be a great company to work with/at" and then the marketing thingie happened...

Especially bad considering that the company is located in an EU member country. (Estonia)

All fixed. Thanks for the feedback guys. We're a tech company, not so much a marketing company, so we probably don't really know what we're doing here :-)

If you are a tech company you should know that require an email adress for a download link is a bad design. Because only marketing people do that... Please don't try to hide the fact that you DID want to harvest valuable email adress from HN. It's too late.

Please don't pile on. If someone makes a mistake, it's enough that they fix it.

As stated in a sibling, it was our genuine intention to send out updates for those who want to get it. I agree it wasn't implemented in the best way and I should have reviewed the landing page, but it certainly wasn't because of ulterior motive.

There are two things in play here - one is that pypy is a large py2-only codebase that is unlikely to be ported. Second is that maintaining python 2 both does not cost much and it's used by the majority of our users, despite of what you hear on the internet. So, there is both good reason to keep it and a large amount of work to drop it.

While I agree with you, pypy already runs cffi fast and we are thinking how to run cython fast. That would cover a large subset of using C API I think.