We’re very excited to announce that today we are releasing a new version of Pyston-lite, our Python JIT-as-an-extension-module, with the headline feature of supporting Python versions 3.7 through 3.10 (Mac and Linux). Previously we only supported Python 3.8, and support for other versions was one of our most-requested features.

To install Pyston-lite, simply do pip install pyston_lite_autoload and your Python environment will be sped up by about 10-25%.

We didn’t think that we’d be able to support multiple versions of Python at once, but this was enabled by some strategic changes that the rest of this post is about.

Background on Pyston-lite

Our original product, which we’re retroactively calling Pyston-full, is a fork of the entire CPython codebase. Having users install a fully-custom version of Python lets us make changes across the Python implementation, leading to the most optimizations and largest speedups.

The flip side is that it is fairly intensive to set up. While we believe Pyston-full is one of the most highly-compatible alternative Python implementations available, it can be difficult to switch Python implementations regardless of the ease of use of either implementation. Compounded on this, we decided to break the ABI which requires users to recompile extension modules. In theory this is not a big deal, but in practice the lack of available binary packages is a significant disincentive to use an alternative implementation.

The sum of all of this was that while we were very happy to achieve a 30% speedup with Pyston-full, it was very difficult to get people to start using it. We decided to try a different form factor: a pip-installable extension module called Pyston-lite.

Pyston-lite reception

It’s only been a few months since we released Pyston-lite, but the numbers since then have been striking: we are getting 100x more downloads per day for Pyston-lite than Pyston-full. Download counts can be misleading, and in our case it seems like most of the downloads are driven by a single project’s CI system, but we think the difference is still quite meaningful.

Because of this we’ve decided to make the strategic change to focus on Pyston-lite as our core product. We’ve heard many people ask for better Python performance, but our experience seems to say that a full alternative implementation is not a particularly appealing solution to this ask. So while it’s a bit difficult to accept that we are now providing a 10% speedup instead of 30%, we’ve decided that it’s much more important to provide something that people are willing to use.

What this means

The very first implication of this is that we can provide support for multiple Python versions, and we are releasing 3.7 through 3.10 support today. Originally with Pyston-full it was untenable to actively develop across four different major versions of Python due to the sheer amount of code changes that would need to be supported. But by focusing our efforts on just the interpreter, it’s now feasible to have a single implementation that contains the appropriate guards and ifdefs to target any of the Python versions we support.

Secondly, this means that we can no longer use many of our runtime optimizations. Fortunately, the non-interpreter changes we’ve made are generally less controversial than the interpreter changes, and we are working to submit them upstream back to CPython. Our first change has already been accepted and provides a few percent speedup. We’re having some unanticipated difficulty with the process of rebasing our other changes from 3.8 to 3.12, so this work is still in progress.

We think of the breakdown roughly as follows: of our roughly 30% original speedup, 10% is going into Pyston-lite, 10% was done independently by the CPython team between 3.8 and main, and the remaining 10% we are hoping to contribute back upstream.

In the longer-term future we are planning to submit our JIT upstream as well, but we expect retargeting it to 3.11 to be significantly more work than the other versions due to the extensive amount of changes that were made to the interpreter in that version.

Organizational changes

We’re very excited about these changes and the additional usage that we hope they unlock, but they also represent a fairly large reduction in scope for the Pyston project. This means that Marius and I (Kevin) are planning to gradually reduce our time investment in the project, and in particular we have made the decision to both leave Anaconda. We’ve been very happy with our original decision to join them, and I believe they have been happy as well, and the arrangement has ended on good terms. We’ve talked about ways we can continue to collaborate but no decisions have been made yet.

Final thoughts

Our goal is to get to the point that new versions of Python contain most of our speedups, and for those who are stuck or prefer to use older versions we offer as many speedups via Pyston-lite as possible. With the release of 3.7-3.10 support today we’re getting much closer to that goal.

Our aim is still to be the magical way of getting better Python performance, and we hope that our release today makes it even more of a no-brainer: just type a single command and get better performance.

As always if you have any questions or want to reach out for any reason, feel free to file an issue on our GitHub or chat with us in our Discord; we hope to hear from you!

Appendix: current benchmark numbers

These numbers are all versus a 3.8 baseline on a c6i.xlarge EC2 instance:

	pyperformance	macrobenchmarks
Pyston (full) 2.3.5	+65%	+28%
pyston-lite 2.3.5 on 3.8	+28%	+10%
CPython 3.11rc2	+26%	+12%