Instagram open sources high-performance Python fork
By making the Cinder project publicly available, social media giant wants to open conversation about upstreaming its performance optimisations to standard Python.
Credit: Dreamstime
Instagram’s Cinder, a performance-oriented fork of CPython 3.8, is now available as Facebook Incubator project on GitHub. The goal of releasing the code was to produce a unified, faster CPython, the social media giant said.
Instagram made Cinder publicly available to generate conversation about upstreaming some of the work to CPython, which is the reference implementation of Python, and reducing duplication of work pertaining to CPython performance.
Cinder features performance optimisations including bytecode inline caching, eager evaluation of coroutines, a method-at-a-time JIT compiler, and an experimental bytecode compiler that uses type annotations to emit type-specialised bytecode that runs better in the JIT. However, Cinder is neither polished nor documented for anyone’s use.