GraalPy – A high-performance embeddable Python 3 runtime for Java

Which version was that with? GraalVM can JIT compile regular expressions these days, with the same compiler as everything else. They implemented TRegex on top of Truffle so regex can be inlined and optimized like regular code.

Performance does indeed depend on workload. There's a page that compares GraalPy vs CPython and Jython on the Python Performance Suite which aims to be "real world":

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/python/Perfo...

There the speedup is smaller, but this is partly because a lot of real world Python workloads these days spend all their time inside C or the GPU. Having a better implementation is still a good idea though, because it means more stuff can be done by researchers who don't know C++ well or at all. The point at which you're forced to get dedicated hackers involved to optimize gets pushed backwards if you can rely on a good JIT.

That is why we should always use a standardized, controlled benchmark suite, which has well-defined rules to assure fair cross-language comparisons with a representative, well-balanced workload. By focusing on a core set of language features and abstractions, Are-we-fast-yet allows for a more controlled comparison of language implementation performance, isolating the effects of compiler and runtime optimizations.

This is especially important for scripting languages like Python, where a large part of the features are implemented in C or other native languages and called via FFI. That's why, for example, the benchmark implements its own collections, because we want to know how fast the interpreter is. Otherwise, as you have noticed, the result is randomly influenced by how much compute a particular application can delegate to the FFI.

Appreciate the further details, thanks! This is a huge undertaking, good luck, and I'll be checking back in here and there.

What I was hoping to be able to do was run our existing cpython project on graal to try and benefit from whatever speedups the jvm (or, if possible, compiling to a native module) would provide, rather than build with the jvm specifically in mind from the get go.

For anyone interested, here's the PyPI repository with additional binary wheels for GraalPy: https://www.graalvm.org/python/wheels/

We also want to make it easy for Python package maintainers to test and build wheels for GraalPy. It's already available via setup-python, and we are adding GraalPy support to cibuildwheel. If you need any help, please reach out to us!

I wonder if hpy will solve the extension problem.

The problem with PyPy is that it doesn't support the C-API, which is required for all those other high performance libraries.

So you gain the perf of a JIT, while losing out on most everything else high-performance in the Python ecosystem.

> I am willing to live with Python as the Lisp we deserve to have

You can have your cake and eat it too https://github.com/hylang/hy

The people disliking the language are very vocal about it, but there is a huge amount of silent people that loves it and an even bigger amount that just like it as much as alternatives. It's mainstream now, not trending like 10 years ago, so there is no hype about it anymore. We just use it to do stuff.

Add to that the existing excellent ecosystem, the strong culture of scientific stacks and a very good story for providing c-extentions (actually the best one in all scripting languages because of things like cibuildwheel).

It's only in small tech bubbles like HN that devs find it surprising.

As a former Perl hacker who started using Python in 2005, I saw Python ride several waves. (Numerical computation, data science, deep learning)

Perl was the leading tool for scripting and text parsing. Python didn’t really supplant it for a long time — until people started writing more complicated scripts that had to be maintained. Perl reads like line noise after 6 months whereas I can look at Python code from 20 years ago, prettify it with black, and understand it.

Python got picked up by the scientific computing community, which gave it some its earliest libraries like numpy, f2py, scipy. Some of us who were on MATLAB moved over.

Then data science happened. Pandas built off the scientific computation foundations and eventually libraries like scikit and matplotlib (mimicking matlab’s plotting) came along.

Then tensorflow came along and built on the foundation of numerical libraries. PyTorch followed.

Other systems like Django came and made python popular for building database backed websites.

Suddenly there was momentum and today almost all numerical software have a python API — this includes proprietary stuff like CPLEX and what have you.

Python was the glue language that had the lowest barrier of entry. For instance, Spark was written in Scala and has a performant Scala API but everyone uses PySpark because it’s much more accessible, despite the interop cost.

The counterfactual to all this was Ruby. It had much nicer syntax than Python but when I tried to use it in grad school I was quickly stymied by the lack of numerical libraries. Ruby never found a niche outside of Rails and config management.

Essentially Python — like Nvidia today — bet on linear algebra (and more broadly on data processing) and won.

I get why there’s hate for Python — it’s not a perfect language. Yet those of us pragmatists who use it understand the trade offs. You trade off on the metal performance for programmer performance. You trade off packaging difficulties for something that works. You trade off an imperfect syntax for getting things done.

I could have used Ruby — a much more beautiful lanaguage — in grad school and worked around its lacks, but I would have not graduated on time. Python was pragmatic choice for me and continues to be one for me today (outside of situations requiring raw performance)

Using Python as C and C++ REPL of sorts has been common in academia since it took the scripting crown away from Perl and Tcl, which were used during the late 90's.

Example see the Bioinformatics papers from that period, and the Perl tooling used alongside the research.

Already in 2003 CERN was using Python on some of their build infrastructure (see CMT), Grid Computing scripting efforts, and we had Python trainings available to us.

Now there is a difference between a REPL of sorts, scripting OS tasks, and going full blown applications with a pure interpreter.

It didn't happen by total accident, but it didn't happen by design for where we are today either. The original choice to start building data science tooling in Python happened intentionally, but since then path dependence has been a huge thing.

Thanks for the question, nurettin.

Although GraalPy can create standalone applications [1], you don't have to turn your hello world script into a self-contained binary. You can, of course, create a JAR that depends on GraalPy, or a fat JAR that contains it, and deploy it just like any other Java application.

We are still updating our docs to mention more details on this and publish some guides, apologies for the delay.

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/python/stand...

I'm assuming you mean "how well does JVM concurrency play with Python concurrency"? Python concurrency works perfectly well on its own, Java/Clojure concurrency works very well on its own, trying to pass multithreaded information across the JVM boundary to Python while bypassing the GIL will result in a segfault (Edit: but there are "with-gil" wrappers you can use to prevent that, at a slight performance hit). In practice this tends not to be much of a problem as you setup a parallel workload on one side of the boundary or the other and pass information with a threadsafe queue. We do plenty of heavy parallel computations, data science, AI, fintech, etc.

There are certainly some leaky abstractions and there is a general expectation that you understand the quirks of Python and Clojure pretty well, so it's not for everyone. Knowing something about Java would probably help too but I've been using libpython-clj in production since 2017 years and I barely know anything about Java (compared to Python/Clojure).

They wouldn’t benefit from performance because as you say they are already blazing fast as is. And I know what you mean — I rewrote a pure (granted old pre-2.0) pandas transformation into duckdb and compute time dropped from nearly an hour to single digit minutes.

But having these in Graal would allow more types of applications to be deployed in JVM stacks. As sibling comments note, many data science models are in python but production stacks are in Java.

I think GraalPython does have a GIL, see https://github.com/oracle/graalpython/blob/master/docs/contr... - and if by "there is no such thing on those platforms" you mean JVM/CLR not having a GIL, C also does not have a GIL but CPython does.

Gradle files are less verbose than the equivalent Maven pom.xml but Gradle tends to have other issues like: complex builds that are hard to maintain, not running on the latest JVM version without some wait time, and constantly breaking because Gradle makes breaking changes every release. I'm hoping the declarative Gradle experiment [0] helps with this.

Additionally if XML isn't your thing Maven is making a push for other formats in Maven 4 like HOCON [1].

[0] https://blog.gradle.org/declarative-gradle-first-eap [1] https://github.com/apache/maven-hocon-extension

jep[0] has existed for a while now, and does what GraalPy is doing quite well.

I'm using it for similar purposes as you stated and for that it works quite well. A research group I am collaborating with does a lot of their work in one Java application (ImageJ for microscopy), so by integrating my Python processing code into that application, it finds its way a lot quicker into the daily workflows of everyone in that group.

Most recently I've also extended the jep setup to include optional Python version bootstrapping via uv[1], so that I can be sure that the plugins I'm writing have the correct Python version available, without people having to install that manually on the machine.

[0]: https://github.com/ninia/jep

[1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Did you look into Jython back then?

Those "smart people" write blackboxes in esoteric languages that only the same person maintains.

Everyone else has to write wrappers to interact with that blackbox. God forbid someone daring to even change the code, because it basically doesn't even need/use junit tests. Eventually the smart person gets bored and moves to something else, that tool then gets rewritten to Java in two days by someone else.

End of story.

Not so vaguely, either. The dev story is not Java but the deploy story is.

When I was learning programming, my coding class used a Bukkit plugin that connected to Python. I can't remember what it was called, but that was for Minecraft 1.7.10.

Not sure if you were wanting Python specifically, but KubeJS lets you use JavaScript for mods. I think there's also a clojure integration.

Thankfully some LLMs also have Java bindings to the same native libraries used by Python.

I guess for pure python applications, they'd rather throw more hardware at the problem than messing with the JVM.

Thanks. I actually managed to run the quick example with Temurin Java 22. Maybe that is what they mean by "OpenJDK": java.vm.name=OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, java.vendor.version=Temurin-22.0.2+9

It won't JIT compile on anything other than GraalVM however. So it'll run, but slowly.

Graal is many things (a marketing nightmare). The guest language part is orthogonal to the native packager AFAIK.