Instagram’s Cinder, a performance-oriented fork of CPython 3.8, is now available as a Facebook Incubator project on GitHub. The goal of releasing the code was to produce a unified, faster CPython, the company 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 optimizations 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-specialized bytecode that runs better in the JIT. However, Cinder is neither polished nor documented for anyone’s use.