Follow Datanami:
August 30, 2021

Anaconda Announces Support for Pyston, Hiring Lead Developers Kevin Modzelewski and Marius Wachtler

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 30, 2021 — Anaconda, Inc., provider of a popular data science platform, today announced that it would begin funding the Pyston project by hiring its lead developers, Kevin Modzelewski and Marius Wachtler. This move marks the latest milestone in Anaconda’s history of advancing state-of-the-art Python performance. At Anaconda, Pyston’s core developers will focus on building an open-source community of users, contributors, and maintainers to ensure the Pyston project’s long-term sustainability.

“Marius and I are thrilled to be continuing our work on the Pyston project at Anaconda. Support from Anaconda will enable us to put Pyston into the hands of more users faster than ever before,” said Kevin Modzelewski, Pyston’s co-founder. “We look forward to working with the team to bring better Python performance to users across a variety of applications.”

Pyston is an open-source implementation of the Python programming language; highly compatible with Python source code, Pyston executes programs on average 20% to 50% faster than standard Python. Pyston was originally developed between 2014 and 2017 at Dropbox, before re-launching from scratch in 2020 with Pyston v2. Support from and collaboration with Anaconda will further accelerate Pyston’s development and adoption among software engineers.

“At Anaconda, we’re passionate about making Python available to a variety of users for a wide range of use cases, and the Pyston project fits in perfectly with that mission,” said Kevin Goldsmith, Anaconda CTO. “We couldn’t be happier to welcome Kevin and Marius to the team and can’t wait to see how the project evolves.”

Pyston will remain an open-source project using the Python Software Foundation License. Moving forward, areas of interest for Pyston development include enhanced compatibility with existing binary Python packages and expanding Pyston to additional hardware platforms. As always, Pyston’s leaders will continue to look for ways to contribute ideas and experience back upstream to the CPython efforts. You can learn more about Anaconda’s commitment to the Pyston project and the collaboration in a blog post here.

About Anaconda

With more than 25 million users, Anaconda is the world’s most popular data science platform and the foundation of modern machine learning. We pioneered the use of Python for data science, champion its vibrant community, and continue to steward open-source projects that make tomorrow’s innovations possible. Our enterprise-grade solutions enable corporate, research, and academic institutions around the world to harness the power of open-source for competitive advantage, groundbreaking research, and a better world.


Source: Anaconda, Inc.

Datanami