Author: Barry Warsaw
Created at: 2025-11-18 00:45
Number: 49
Clean content: Donghee Na: However, I am cautious about the idea of fully rewriting the CPython codebase in Rust. I would go further and predict that this will never happen, and claim that it shouldn’t be a goal of the Rust-in-Python project.  There are 10**oodles of person-years invested in the CPython core interpreter, and I just don’t see how that will ever be cost effective to rewrite, even as a Ship of Theseus . But that’s not to say we shouldn’t go forward with this experiment, because we’ll better understand the costs and benefits [1] . One of the soft consequences I’m especially interested in is whether this attracts more or fewer core developers contributing to the Rust bits than the C bits.  I don’t remember the numbers, but I vaguely recall some discussion about the number of core devs who are comfortable contributing to the C bits vs the Python bits.  The former is surely a smaller number, and my guess is that even fewer are comfortable in Rust today [2] . and better know the unknown unknowns ↩︎ To be clear, I consider everyone’s contributions, regardless of where or what language, to be incredibly valuable and valued ↩︎
