That list actually seems genuinely pretty minimal. Reading your comment I was expecting a long major list of changes, but it's only 3 things, most of which seem relatively unlikely to impact most programs, with the possible exception of dictionary sort order.
Really? The lack of Unicode strings immediately disqualifies this for most things I've worked on the last few years. No emojis, no diacritics, no non-US users. Ok for internal tools for American companies with an older workforce, I guess, but I wouldn't use this for anything that takes input from the general public (e.g., customers).
The list of small things are for data structure. However, the language is a lot less dynamic than Python:
> Since Codon performs static type checking ahead of time, a few of Python's dynamic features are disallowed. For example, monkey patching classes at runtime (although Codon supports a form of this at compile time) or adding objects of different types to a collection.
While monkey patching is maybe not done so much in Python (outside of unit testing), adding objects of different to a collection is definitely a common operation!
From what I understand, this will be possible in the future with implicit union types. Wouldn't work with _arbitrary_ types, but with a set of types that can be computed at compile time (my guess is that this is possible in most real-world cases).
That list is minimal. Elsewhere there's the no heterogenous lists and no biginteger restrictions, and it looks like import doesn't work either. Presumably no heterogenous dictionaries either - so not only unordered, but also simply typed.
Read the entire page. Those three bullet points aren't the extent of it. This is like the difference between Ruby and Crystal; the same syntax, similar culture, but they're fundamentally different languages.
> …with the possible exception of dictionary sort order.
Which is an implementation detail that is not guaranteed by the language standard.
Porting code from 2 to 3 made me have to use a sorted dict because the code relied on the insertion order (metaclass magic operating on the class dict) but when they revamped the dictionary implementation I could do away with that fix. Until they come up with a more efficient dict and break everyone’s code again.
Does make me want to dust off the old spark parser and see what this can do with it.
