So we read a lot on HN about how JRuby has taken off, in terms of Chris Seaton's work with Truffle, Graal, and dynamicinvoke research for Java. JRuby, with efforts by him and sepearate work by others, has shown that jokes aside, porting successful languages or language styles to Java (JRuby, Clojure, Scala, and others) has real benefits. I mean even if you hate Java/JVM stuff, you can use paradigms and tools, partially or completely, on a stack you hate. For some of us that is a godsend, and I think it shows how cool open source programming is, where people are porting whole runtimes and languages to mix-match for their pleasure.
Now, with that in mind, I heard a long time ago, and it might be utter BS that Jython is way behind JRuby in terms of community, and very fairly, not as performant or robust bc there are only so many eyes for shallow bugs. Is this true? I see geovizer and others are making use of it, but others using it to good effect and it is worth their while?
I am now studying Java academically, and played with Python for years. The idea of doing Django-REST-Framework on Jython instead of learning Rails-API for JRuby as trial by fire exercise, at least in my mind, is more appealing. So anyone know how realistic this is?
I think the difference is that PyPy exists, so people who just want "a faster Python" tend to go there, whereas in ruby-land JRuby gets the people who just want "a faster Ruby" as well as those who want Ruby on the JVM.
Honestly I wouldn't recommend trying to use Django on Jython (I'd be amazed if it all works), or really doing anything on either Jython or JRuby unless you're already familiar with all of the pieces. To understand and debug Jython properly you need a good understanding of both Python and Java. For a first JVM project, find something good and idiomatic in Java (I hear good things about Dropwizard) and use that.
Jython long pre-exists any of the work on Truffle and Graal — the priority of the 2.7 release was just getting back to being compatible with an up-to-date Python release, and very little work was done on performance. (It's often faster than CPython for warm code, but also a lot slower than PyPy.) The majority of people who use Jython use it for interoperability with other JVM languages, rather than performance per-se.
There's also ZipPy, a Python 3 implementation based on Truffle/Graal. In some benchmarks, it far out-performs even PyPy, but it's very much incomplete so it's hard to make general conclusions as many (most?) larger benchmarks don't run.
>> Now, with that in mind, I heard a long time ago, and it might be utter BS that Jython is way behind JRuby in terms of community, and very fairly, not as performant or robust bc there are only so many eyes for shallow bugs. Is this true?
JRuby has Charles Nutter. No disrespect to Frank, but Nutter has really been a champion for dynamic langauges on the JVM, out in front, pushing all the time (JEP-191).
Alternate Ruby implementations are much more popular because MRI is much, much worse than CPython in terms of performance and memory usage. Alternate implementations are therefore much less important for Python.
I wanted to say "thanks" to the Jython team. I've been using Jython for a few years for a project (called STempo) that uses Java and Python. Jython has been a great bridge between them, we have run into a number of issues in the project but Jython has always been solid. The senior faculty on our project knows Python but not Java and she can happily develop in CPython and it always works fine when I bring it into Java-land (assuming no dependencies written in C have crept in). Bravo and thanks!
I'm glad to see Jython make this progress. Unfortunately, it's still nearly 5 years behind Python itself---Python 2.7 was released in July 2010.[1] The leap to 2.7 is a huge deal, though, as that's the "gold standard" for Python 2 these days.
Congrats! Very useful project. I chatted with one of the main developers on freenode and he was very helpful.
I was trying to get Jython working better with RPyC which turns out to be a nice way to integrate CPython with Java libraries.
Congratulations to the Jython team! I do have one question though which I can't seem to find a recent answer for: How's the performance of Jython these days? Especially with the 2.7.0 release. The most recent answers I could find on Google were for 2.5 from a few years back which said it was about comparable with CPython. (if that's still the case, that's fine, I'm just curious about that as Jython could make a nice scripting language on top of a Java project and I'd like to be able to keep performance considerations in mind)
Check out Jim Baker's PyCon 2015 talk "Getting to Jython 2.7 and beyond[0]" and associated slides[1].
Using the test.pystone bechmark, it is 30-40% faster than CPython, but the team didn't focus on performance during this release, just compatibility. The performance increases are almost entirely from improvements in the JVM.
Give it a shot. Very little work to get it embedded as a scripting language into an existing Java project.
If performance becomes an issue look at Groovy, but it probably won't become an issue.
Because its so easy to integrate you should just do it without even looking at performance.
Definitely worth trying--I've used it for the same purpose, and the only performance issue has been a slow startup time (several seconds to load standard libraries).
[+] [-] 616c|11 years ago|reply
Now, with that in mind, I heard a long time ago, and it might be utter BS that Jython is way behind JRuby in terms of community, and very fairly, not as performant or robust bc there are only so many eyes for shallow bugs. Is this true? I see geovizer and others are making use of it, but others using it to good effect and it is worth their while?
I am now studying Java academically, and played with Python for years. The idea of doing Django-REST-Framework on Jython instead of learning Rails-API for JRuby as trial by fire exercise, at least in my mind, is more appealing. So anyone know how realistic this is?
[+] [-] lmm|11 years ago|reply
Honestly I wouldn't recommend trying to use Django on Jython (I'd be amazed if it all works), or really doing anything on either Jython or JRuby unless you're already familiar with all of the pieces. To understand and debug Jython properly you need a good understanding of both Python and Java. For a first JVM project, find something good and idiomatic in Java (I hear good things about Dropwizard) and use that.
[+] [-] gsnedders|11 years ago|reply
There's also ZipPy, a Python 3 implementation based on Truffle/Graal. In some benchmarks, it far out-performs even PyPy, but it's very much incomplete so it's hard to make general conclusions as many (most?) larger benchmarks don't run.
[+] [-] marktangotango|11 years ago|reply
JRuby has Charles Nutter. No disrespect to Frank, but Nutter has really been a champion for dynamic langauges on the JVM, out in front, pushing all the time (JEP-191).
[+] [-] cookiecaper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geovizer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wilsonfiifi|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://vertx.io/
[1] https://github.com/rdolgushin/mod-lang-jython
[+] [-] pc2g4d|11 years ago|reply
[1]: https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7/
[+] [-] julienchastang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericfrederich|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gchp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FreezerburnV|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Notre1|11 years ago|reply
Using the test.pystone bechmark, it is 30-40% faster than CPython, but the team didn't focus on performance during this release, just compatibility. The performance increases are almost entirely from improvements in the JVM.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLm3garVQFo#t=1m32s
[1]: https://speakerdeck.com/wolevertest/jim-baker-getting-to-jyt...
[+] [-] ericfrederich|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafebeen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wlievens|11 years ago|reply
Get cracking Stefan!
[+] [-] hnisdumb|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] iso8859-1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fs111|11 years ago|reply