We just learned that Paul Sokolovsky , long-term maintainer of the MicroPython project, forked into
Pycopy - a minimalist and memory-efficient Python dialect. Good for desktop, cloud, constrained systems, microcontrollers, and just everything. - GitHub - pfalcon/pycopy: Pycopy - a minimalist and ...
To give some more context about different MicroPython forks, you might be interested in Introduction to MicroPython as well as ESP-IDF and beyond: Lua with NodeMCU, Pycom's MicroPython fork and Adafruit's CircuitPython .
Fork FAQ
Q: Why fork?
A: I was a co-maintainer of MicroPython from 2013-12-29 till 2017-12-27, and authored 2779 commits during that time, that’s more than 30% of commits during that timeframe (prooflink ). Many MicroPython’s modules and subsystems were designed and implemented by me. After I lost commit access to the main repository, I continue my work here.
Q: Why wasn’t it renamed?
A: My fork is just one of 1900+ forks of MicroPython (prooflink: fork stats ). I mostly do everything like they do, and it’s just a convenience to continue calling it MicroPython, so everyone understands what the talk is about, especially given that during 4 years, I spent a lot of effort to promote MicroPython and designed/implemented many things in it, without which MicroPython wouldn’t be what it is today. But if you want to look at the renamed project, you can: GitHub - pfalcon/pycopy: Pycopy - a minimalist and memory-efficient Python dialect. Good for desktop, cloud, constrained systems, microcontrollers, and just everything. . Update: It’s effectively renamed now. Up to people which name to use.
Q: Relation to the upstream?
A: I rebase on the upstream regularly (and branch master in this repository is still upstream). I revert commits I consider going in wrong direction or not implemented thoroughly enough. Some things from this repo got pulled into upstream, some I submit as pull requests myself (with pull request processing in the upstream being slow and number of my patches since even co-mainainership time aren’t processed for years, I don’t really have incentive to submit too much/too often).
Q: Focus of the fork?
A:
Code optimizations.
Continue to develop inplace, buffer and stream operations allowing
Garbage collection experiments.
Reflection features (ultimately allowing to develop optimizing compilers,
More CPython features implemented (configurable).
“Development/Testing” version with improved program analysis features.
etc.
https://pycopy.readthedocs.io/
While this might not have a direct impact on all people programming the FiPy through Pycom’s MicroPython fork when looking at the core MicroPython itself, you should well be aware that GitHub - micropython/micropython-lib: Core Python libraries ported to MicroPython will not be the only place to go shopping for modules from the MicroPython standard library.
So, you should well also have a look at GitHub - pfalcon/pycopy-lib: Standard library for Pycopy and compatible programming languages which is also reflected with the corresponding packages on PyPI, see https://pypi.org/search/?q=pycopy .