EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
For more than two decades, EVE Online has been one of the most fascinating case studies in the large-scale use of Python.
Since its launch in 2003, it has run on Stackless Python. The last major upgrade was 16 years ago, when it was upgraded to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010.
Their migration to Python 3 will initially involve processing 2.4 million lines of code with the futurize script, followed by a careful manual review of approximately 20,000 places where Python 2 and Python 3 behave differently—for example, 1 / 2 evaluates to 0 in Python 2, but to 0.5 in Python 3.
The announcement does not mention how they plan to replace Stackless. However, at last year’s developer conference, they presented “Scheduling in Carbon: Leaving Stackless Python Behind”, explaining how they replaced Stackless in the Carbon engine of their newer game, EVE Frontier, using their now-open-source carbonengine/scheduler library.