Relatedly, the homepage itself doesnt make it obvious it’s still alpha, or not ready, or not actually going to speed up your code this moment - claims like “automatically achieves near-ideal speedup, up to 1000+ threads” - the point is that it parallelizes code, but the word speedup makes it sound like my code will get 1000x faster.
I think you can avoid this kind of criticism by setting expectations better - just plastering a banner at the top saying that it’s in early stage development and not optimized, but that the future is bright, for example. The current headline saying it’s the “parallel future of computation” isn’t really enough to make people understand that the future isn’t here yet.
Same goes for the README, the fact that it’s not production ready per-se really ought to be at the top to set people’s expectations properly IMO, since a lot of people will not read the whole wall of text and just jump straight into trying it out once they’re on your GitHub page.
They’re critical since they are led to have much higher expectations than what actually exists today.
That said, this is a cool project and wish you the best in making it really good!
It is not in alpha, nor not ready. You can use it in production today, if you want to. It is just not fast. That is different. CPython is still 100x slower than C, and is widely deployed in practice.
Seems like these are major problems for software whose whole purpose appears to make parallelizable programs go faster... Maybe I just don't understand the point then. To me it appears like a cool tech demo that fails to achieve the actual goal of delivering performance increases (by better utilizing the hardware), but it sounds like from your reply that being a cool tech demo that is probably not actually practical for truly leveraging your hardware... is the goal? So this is more of a research project than an actual worthwhile tool?
Based on how you've made a nice marketing page and README that sounds like you want people to actually use this tool in practice, within that context correctness is a minimum requirement/table stakes for a language to be usable at all, but that alone doesn't make it "production ready" if it fails to practically achieve anything you'd realistically want to do with it better than old-school languages that people already know how to use.
I am not a Python dev, but it seems that CPython's goal is not to be as fast as C, but just that it is a default runtime for Python [1] and the fact that C is in its name is just an implementation detail. Very different.
So the criticism leveled at the project appears to be valid.
While it is not fast in a single-thread, it is still 5x-7x faster than Node.js today for programs that are allocate a lot. If all you want is to run a program faster, and doesn't mind a bit more energy, Bend could be useful for you today.
And that's comparing a first-version interpreter against a SOTA runtime deployed in all browsers around the world and optimized by all major companies over 20+ years. If that's not useful to you, that's useful to me, which is why I wanted to share so it can be useful to more people.
We'll add the disclaimer before the install instructions instead!