Python Is it worth investing time in obviously stagnant modules?

Question

To make it quick and dirty - I'm a beginner programmer who stares at Pyglet, it looks like a really clean and friendly module to use, unlike something like PyGame, which, even looking with its inexperienced eyes, is a beast.

However. PyGame is constantly being used, updated, reused by a lot of people and seems to be quite significant. Pyglet has not been updated since January 2010. Most of the works of art never end, only abandoned - but two years and still on v 1.1.4 seem alarming.

Therefore, although I can specifically ask about Pyglet and PyGame, I don’t know either, because it makes me wonder about other ghost modules that may be hiding there that they once promised, but for some reason, fell or stuck in a corner and not very relevant. Are such abandoned projects not worth the time and investment in outer space?

Answer 1

as the owner of the sleeping package, my own call:

• a more popular package will have better community support. for many people, I think this cancels out any other considerations. often it’s better to have support for a mediocre package than to fight with a terrific package that no one uses.
• and it can be popular because it is better. obviously, I am biased by the outsider (see above) here, but I must say that if the package never received many users, it might not be very good for the market.

BUT

• if the package is mature and working and it does what you want, why not use it? especially when open source means that you can fix the errors yourself if necessary.

so, it depends. ceteris paribus - use the popular choice. if you need support, use the popular choice. but if the package exactly scratches the itch, and it is open source there too, I will consider it anyway.

important qualification: this is for personal projects - for work I must use popular projects so that others can support the code that I wrote.

python specific rider: another thing to worry about is support for python 3. if the sleeping package is stuck on python 2, I would think twice because in the long run there is a real chance that it will stop working with python defaults.

Answer 2

The answer from andrew-cooke is present, but I just wanted to mention that I used Panda3D and highly recommend it as an alternative.

It has fantastic documentation, good performance and a pleasant community of users who are willing to help on forums and IRC. It is also still actively developing, version 1.8 is approaching release.

Answer 3

Rephrase Monty Python

No, he does not stagnate, he, he relaxes!

Open source maintainers are moving or doing other things. If you feel Pyglet is a good choice for your application, create a repo clone, add changes to insert code hosting flavor of the month and do some work. There are benefits to having a community ask for help or fixing bugs.

However, if something is open source and appropriate for your project, the lack of maintainer should be seen as an opportunity , not a problem.

Answer 4

Although perhaps not as active as Pygame, Pyglet doesn't quite stagnate. Look at the latest commits , and you will see that there are several more participants, and several commits 4 days before the time of writing.

True, there has not yet been an official release, and despite some lengthy discussions about release 1.2, obviously nothing has happened yet.

The accepted answer is certainly still present, but thought it was worth mentioning at least.

Answer 5

In this case, PyGame and Pyglet are orthogonal.

PyGame is a shell of the C ++ SDL library that does everything related to the game, except for 3D rendering. ( Does pyGame perform 3d? ) Pyglet is an OpenGL wrapper that performs only three-dimensional rendering.

So PyGame lets you do things like capture controller input, loading textures from files and playing sounds. However, the graphics are very primitive because they cannot use the GPU. Pyglet will provide you with GPU rendering, but will not help with any of these inefficient critical things that PyGame handles.

They are ideal for sharing.