In 2009-2010 Google tried to merge a separate version of Python inside the official one but didn't ultimately succeed.
The story around it was interesting for a few reasons:
Google at the time was really deep into Python, they were using it for all sorts of things and they employed a few core teams devs, Guido Van Rossum (the creator) included
"Unladen swallow" (the code name of this branch), was used internally and promised some performance improvements
Among those improvements there was a JIT compiler (Ruby 2.6 for example has merged an experimental JIT compiler, ten years later)
The reason it failed:
they thought they could reach 5x speed in single threaded cases but actually they were around 1.x kind of increase
The community already had a JIT enabled project, PyPy, which was a separate effort
Developers were not excited about it and also assumed that Google would maintain the code for ever and ever (honestly, nobody wants to merge an insanely huge patch that requires a lot of work to adjust in an already successful project)
So, it was a good idea, but it technically didn't work the way they tried it and there was not enough support around it to keep at it for a long time and hopefully improve the performance gains.
I think this story mostly speaks of what it means to mantain a hugely successful open source project and the relationship with contributors, even if they are a big company ;-)
In 2009-2010 Google tried to merge a separate version of Python inside the official one but didn't ultimately succeed.
The story around it was interesting for a few reasons:
The reason it failed:
So, it was a good idea, but it technically didn't work the way they tried it and there was not enough support around it to keep at it for a long time and hopefully improve the performance gains.
I think this story mostly speaks of what it means to mantain a hugely successful open source project and the relationship with contributors, even if they are a big company ;-)
If anyone is interested, the details and the story are here: python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/