The first year of free-threaded Python

On the other news, Microsoft dumped the whole faster Python team, apparently the 2025 earnings weren't enough to keep the team around.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mdboom_its-been-a-tough-coupl...

Lets see whatever performance improvements still land on CPython, unless other company sponsors the work.

I guess Facebook (no need to correct me on the name) is still sponsoring part of it.

Ah that's very, very sad. I guess they have embraced and extended, there's only one thing left to do.

At this stage the cliched and clueless comments about embrace/extend/extinguish are tiresome and inevitable whenever Microsoft is mentioned.

A few decades ago MS did indeed have a playbook which they used to undermine open standards. Laying off some members of the Python team bears no resemblence whatsoever to that. At worst it will delay the improvement of free-threaded Python. That's all.

Your comment is lazy and unfounded.

cough Bullshit cough

* VSCode got popular and they started preventing forks from installing its extensions.

* They extended the Free Source pyright language server into the proprietary pylance. They don’t even sell it. It’s just there to make the FOSS version less useful.

* They bought GitHub and started rate limiting it to unlogged in visitors.

Every time Microsoft touches a thing, they end up locking it down. They can’t help it. It’s their nature. And if you’re the frog carrying that scorpion across the pond and it stings you, well, you can only blame it so much. You knew this when they offered the deal.

Every time. It hasn’t changed substantially since they declared that Linux is cancer, except to be more subtle in their attacks.

I actually hate this trope more because of what is says about the poster. Which I guess would, that they're someone wearing horse blinders.

There's a part of me that wants to scream at them:

"Look around you!!! It's not 1999 anymore!!! These days we have Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, etc, which are just as bad if not worse!!! Cut it out with the 20+ year old bad jokes!!!"

Yes, Microsoft is bad. The reason Micr$oft was the enemy back in the day is because they... won. They were bigger than anyone else in the fields that mattered (except for server-side, where they almost one). Now they're just 1 in a gang of evils. There's nothing special about them anymore. I'm more scared of Apple and Google.

That’s only reasonable if you believe you can only distrust one company at a time. I distrust every one you mentioned there, for different reasons, in different ways. I don’t think that Apple is trying to exclusively own the field of programming tools to their own profit, nor do I think that Facebook is. I don’t think Apple is trying to own all data about every human. I don’t think Microsoft is trying to force all vendors to sell through their app store.

But the thing is that Microsoft hasn’t seemed to fundamentally change since 1999. They appear kinder and friendlier but they keep running the same EEE playbook everywhere they can. Lots of us give them a free pass because they let us run a nifty free-for-now programming editor. That doesn’t change the leopard’s spots, though.