In a tweet published Thursday at noon, Python programming language creator Guido van Rossum introduced he shall be becoming a member of Microsoft’s Developer Division, the place he shall be working to enhance Python on Home windows and Python typically.
“I made a decision that retirement was boring,” van Rossum wrote in saying he had joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. “To do what? Too many choices to say! But it surely’ll make utilizing Python higher for positive (and never simply on Home windows :-). There’s plenty of open supply right here. Watch this house.”
That is removed from the primary time Microsoft and Python may have joined forces. Microsoft has supplied Python builders with broadly used add-ons for Microsoft’s Visible Studio Code editor. The newest technology of those, Pylance, supplies high-speed kind checking and code evaluation for Python code bases, together with help for Python-specific tooling like Jupyter Pocket book. One other current Microsoft/Python undertaking, Playwright, supplies a quick and handy option to check Python internet purposes.
Microsoft has additionally contributed to the Python codebase straight prior to now. A serious key addition for Python three.6 was PEP 523, a change to Python’s C API to make it doable for debugging instruments, or just-in-time compilers (like Microsoft’s Pyjion undertaking), to intercept and override the analysis of Python code.
What van Rossum hints at might simply fall into both of those classes—tooling for Python, or elementary adjustments to Python itself. There isn’t any scarcity of issues van Rossum and Microsoft might search to enhance with Python.
As the usage of Python has exploded throughout the software program growth world, the widespread adoption of the language has additionally revealed most of the limits created by its architectural selections. Putting in and managing third-party modules in Python continues to be inelegant and fragmented, with one commonplace however minimal undertaking (Pip) and a slew of extra formidable however conflicting alternate options (Poetry, Pipenv, and so on.).
Python additionally lacks a standardized option to deploy self-contained binaries, and it’s nonetheless troublesome to get Python applications to run on a number of hardware cores. All of those areas, and lots of extra, are ripe for van Rossum and Microsoft to work on collectively.