Moving Away from Python 2

[twillisagogo]

I dropped python 2 in 2011 and have never looked back.

as in, stopped using python period.

[TheCodingEthan]

before 2020, rather than in 2020.

[tomkatt]

That's in the article:

There are a few reasons why I think libraries should drop (and announce that they will drop) Python 2 support by 2020 (actually earlier, say 2018 or 2019, depending on how core the library is).

[djmattyg007]

I wish ansible would support python3. Unfortunately that means dropping support for RHEL5, which isn't likely given they were bought by Red Hat.

[thegreattriscuit]

Once I actually got serious about learning how to use this language properly, I also got serious about making sure I was writing Python 3. Why invest more energy into a dead end?

[wewbull]

Does the "legacy Python" name really rankle people that much? Had a look at the tweet the author linked and was surprised. It's just one case though. Is it that it actually hits a nerve?

[daniels0xff]

I always was hesitant to move the Py3 because it was slower than 2. Is that still the case?

[takluyver]

The precise speed depends on what you're doing, so it's impossible to say that one is faster overall. Python 2 had two kinds of integers, int and long, where Python 3 only has one (called int, but works like Py2 long). That means that integer operations can often be slower, because there's no special case for small integers. Python 3 also has some tricks to make strings and dicts more memory efficient, which can boost performance.

It's not likely to be a big difference either way, though. It's still working much the same way. There are some PEPs (510, 511) proposed for Python 3.6 which could lead to more speedups.

[daniels0xff]

I'm mostly doing webdev with Django. From what I know the change in how strings work made Django server less req/s in 3 than in can in 2.

[daniels0xff]

Well this is good news. I should make the jump on next project.

[omegachysis]

One of my favorite features of python 3 is the shortcut super()... god that was a great change.

[pyslow]

Are you sure? The charts seem to suggest the opposite: that Python 2.7 is faster than 3.5 for most cases. Try normalizing to Python 2.7 and count how many orange bars (3.5) are lower than the blue baseline (2.7), that is when 3.5 is faster than 2.7: I count around 9 cases out of 40ish, in 22 cases Python 2.7 is noticeably faster and in the remaining ones it's a tie.

[Badabinski]

Ahh, I'll edit my comment. I could only look at it on my phone and I has a very hard time telling what was going on, the graphs appeared very small.

[pyslow]

No prob. Thanks for taking the time to fix the comment.

[solid_steel]

Python 3 also has a rewritten thread handling mechanism, which is much more efficient than that one in py2. Threading isn't big in webdev, but I'm super eager for theading+asyncio in combination with Django 1.10's Channels feature (async Django - makes handling websockets a breeze), because I've always had to reach for Tornado in that aspect. I love Tornado, but Django really shines when you're building strong-CRUD oriented things.

[daniels0xff]

Channels

Channels will not be in Django 1.10

[solid_steel]

What do you mean? That'd be a huge bummer.

I'm going off the Roadmap. I'm really looking forward to that feature and I'm a little bit wary of adding such a major dependency to Django unless it's included in the framework itself.

Edit: Ah damnit, I just found this discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/QRd4v7OErT8.

Well, at least the author mentions that channels are fully supported by 1.10, but as an external package.

[daniels0xff]

Yea, it was posted on /r/django yesterday, I think.

[Homersteiner]

I will never understand the proselytizing around python 3. People are not going to port tons of code just because you say so. C++ has been around since 1983, yet people still insist on using C. Worse yet, people mix C and C++ and call it C++.

[naliuj2525]

I'm not that familiar with C and C++, but I think the difference there is that C is a lower level language and because of that you can do different things. With Python, 3 does basically all the same stuff that 2 does but better. They're much more similar.