I joined the team more than three years ago, and the challenge was clear:
- allow as many people as possible to use Python on the Web without even thinking about it
- also let them use MicroPython for simpler tasks that should run as soon as possible
- give kids, students, professionals, and universities a way into Python through the Web, with no OS or local configuration ceremony 🥳
... and gosh, we delivered. It has been a genuinely challenging journey, filled with technical hacks, solutions nobody had seen before, satisfaction, a lot of fun, and yet ...
We all know how fast the tech landscape changes. We also know that, at some point, someone has to draw a line.
We recently did. Adoption, OSS contributions, and the kind of promotion that comes from people publishing articles and success stories never really grew the way we hoped. That is not a reflection of the people who did show up — you were wonderful — but keeping a project maintained still has a cost, even when it is solid and still loved. Sustainability is something every Open Source project has to face: you invest, you wait, and after years of investment that never quite produced the outcome you expected, you have to make a decision.
We're here: the project works, and it is rock-solid. There are very few open issues, which is a good sign, and pull requests have been close to zero.
I wish I could have spent more time on demos, outreach, and storytelling. Most of our energy went into making PyScript reliable and pleasant to use, and that was never a lack of care — if anything, it was the opposite. The honest picture is that PyScript remained a niche. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but we had hoped the niche would grow enough to sustain the pace we once had, and that did not happen.
We are switching the PyScript and Polyscript repositories into maintenance mode. That means we will no longer be able to take on new issues or pull requests (we have rarely seen these anyway).
We still love PyScript, and we still use it internally for everything we need. Unfortunately, there is no time allocated to add features we do not consider essential. At the same time, we will keep it updated with Pyodide releases, because we care about exposing Pyodide's excellent features and improvements whenever that is needed.
This also means the current API is frozen: no API changes are planned for the time being. Only Pyodide will be updated, and with a much lower frequency than before.
Our repositories are Open Source. You can fork, patch, improve, and promote your own variant of what we have built, as long as the Apache 2.0 License is preserved. That is the beauty of Open Source: there is never really an end. We are not putting an end to the project either. We simply feel there is no need to change much right now, because it already covers dozens, if not hundreds, of use cases we are still exploring internally.
- The only channel to retrieve PyScript will be our CDN. npm may not see a new version for the time being.
- We will keep Pyodide updated, though with a less frequent cadence than before, as changes there are rarely that critical for our, or common, use cases.
- Polyscript may still see npm releases, but it will not guarantee stability around other runtimes. We will also stop updating foreign runtimes, as interest in those remained limited.
- You can still fork both projects and keep them alive. If you do, we would be genuinely happy to see where you take them.
- The Discord channel may be sunset as well, because the team will no longer have the capacity to answer questions there and I am focusing on other tasks, so that I may also step away from this Discord channel in the near future.
Again, it has been a heck of a journey with all of you. We loved your passion, hints, demos, experiments, libraries, and everything else that happened along the way. Many of you inspired us in ways that are hard to put into words. We simply no longer have the capacity to keep this project moving at the pace it once had. I still think it is wonderful — just too small a niche to keep investing in at the same level. And the Pyodide team continues to rock everything you need to run Python on the Web.
Thank you, and goodbye for now. It has been an honor to be part of this 👋
@Ericwasepic127 the whole point is no, I don't have time allocated anymore for that, busy days ... read the project, read the docs, read the package.json, you need to try a bit harder because everything is documented for releases and whatnot. Good luck!