Django ported to Python3!

[Ron]

It looks like Vinay Sajip has succeeded in porting Django to Python3
(in a shared code base for Python 3.2 and Python 2.7). This is an
astoundingly good job, done very fast and is big news.
See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/XjrX3FIPT-U
and the actual code is at Bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/django

With NumPy and SciPy already ported, and with Matplotlib almost there,
maybe PIL and others will follow shortly. This could be a turning
point, or a milestone, or whatever you want to call it. Vinay is a
hero who should be thanked and congratulated!

In an infinitely less important note, Python411 podcasts are finally
back online after a three month occultation due to a prolonged and
ugly billing dispute with Libsyn. Maybe I can interview Vinay and
have him tell us about the porting effort!

 

[Stefan Behnel]

Ron, 02.12.2011 22:47:

It looks like Vinay Sajip has succeeded in porting Django to Python3
(in a shared code base for Python 3.2 and Python 2.7). This is an
astoundingly good job, done very fast and is big news.
See https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/django-developers/XjrX3FIPT-U
and the actual code is at Bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/django

With NumPy and SciPy already ported, and with Matplotlib almost there,
maybe PIL and others will follow shortly. This could be a turning
point, or a milestone, or whatever you want to call it. Vinay is a
hero who should be thanked and congratulated!

Note that most of the work was done by Martin von Löwis, quite a while back
in the early days of Python 3.x.

http://wiki.python.org/moin/PortingDjangoTo3k

He also did a huge amount of lobbying to get the changes accepted before
the time that the project originally envisioned. The original plans of the
Django project were to only *start* the porting after dropping support for
Python 2.5 somewhere in the future. Martin made it rather clear with his
patch (and keeps reiterating it wherever he can) that you can support both
in one code base, even in a project as large as Django.

Stefan

 

[Ron]

Thanks Stefan for clarifying that. I guess Martin deserves most of the
credit.

But I still admire how Sajip jumped in, and I especially admire how
the core team accepted his work without taking a "Not Invented Here"
attitude.

I sure hope the port is accepted into the main trunk soon. There is
just such a huge difference bewtween "90% done" and actually released.
Often code is 90% done but is never finished. And Django has such
enormous psychological significance for Python 3. Many important
projects will never begin serious porting until after Django
officially supports Python 3. And many Python folks will finally start
to take Python 3 seriously only when Django does announce official
support.

Ron

 

[Roy Smith]

Django has such
enormous psychological significance for Python 3. Many important
projects will never begin serious porting until after Django
officially supports Python 3. And many Python folks will finally start
to take Python 3 seriously only when Django does announce official
support.

In a somewhat related topic, it looks like Mongodb will also be
supporting Python 3 soon. It's on the roadmap for their 2.2 release
(https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/PYTHON-84). There's no date announced
yet, but extrapolating from past release schedules, I'd guess mid 2012.