Python in 2024: Faster, More Powerful, and More Popular Than Ever

“In 2024, Python has proven time and time again why it is one of the most popular, useful, and promising programming languages,” Information World writes:

The latest version of the language pushes the envelope even further for speed and powerful functionality that ditches many of Python’s oldest elements and broadens its appeal to developers around the world. Let’s take a look back at this year in Python.

In the biggest news of the year, the Python core development team has taken a major step toward overcoming one of Python’s long-standing shortcomings: global interpreter lock or “GIL”, a mechanism for managing interpreter state. The GIL prevents data corruption across threads in Python programs, but at the cost of making threads virtually useless for CPU-intensive work. Over the years, various attempts to remove the GIL have failed because they significantly slow down single-threaded Python programs. but Recent GIL-free projects Goes a long way to solve this problem – enough Available for trial use by general users.

GIL-less or “free-threaded” builds are still considered experimental, so they should not be deployed in production. The Python team hopes to mitigate single-thread performance impacts and any other issues as much as possible before fully green-lighting GIL-free builds. It’s also entirely possible that these builds will never reach full production-ready status, but the early signs are encouraging.

Another forward-looking feature introduced in Python 3.13 is Experimental just-in-time compiler or just-in-time production. It extends previous efforts to speed up the interpreter: generate machine code for certain operations at runtime. Right now, the speedup isn’t that much (maybe 5% for most programs), but future versions of Python will expand the JIT’s capabilities to yield real-world rewards.

Now Python More widely used than JavaScript on GitHub (Thanks in part to its role in artificial intelligence and data science coding).