Astral's work is great but I wonder how they plan to become sustainable. Maybe it's one of those VC plays where they don't intend to ever really make money and it's essentially a productivity subsidy for the other startups.
My experience has been that most apps are bottlenecked on CPU outside of themselves during CI. Either in JIT runtimes, databases, browsers, or libraries they invoke. I guess now maybe models too. So implementation language won't necessarily make a huge difference to this - we need fresh ideas for how to make order of magnitude improvements here. They will probably vary between ecosystems.
We'll see if that works out for them, but I also worked with their founder Charlie previously at Khan Academy, and I trust he sincerely wants to make that work.
That makes sense, that they're bottle-necked elsewhere as well.
For my current CI runs on Microsoft sample repos, mypy and Playwright are the two big time-takers, and since I run the CI on a matrix of Python versions, OSes, and Node versions, I do want it to be quite fast. You can see the timing here:
Yeah, for sample apps it makes sense that linting and type checking would be a much bigger part of the overall time. The tests only take 50 seconds to run whereas it takes 2-3 minutes for type checking! I can see why they can make a business out of optimizing that. I wonder if GraalPy executes it faster.
It backs up my point about how much low hanging fruit is out there though. Every point in the matrix re-does linting and type checking, although presumably it's only needed once.
Astral's work is great but I wonder how they plan to become sustainable. Maybe it's one of those VC plays where they don't intend to ever really make money and it's essentially a productivity subsidy for the other startups.
My experience has been that most apps are bottlenecked on CPU outside of themselves during CI. Either in JIT runtimes, databases, browsers, or libraries they invoke. I guess now maybe models too. So implementation language won't necessarily make a huge difference to this - we need fresh ideas for how to make order of magnitude improvements here. They will probably vary between ecosystems.