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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-08-29)

  • Simon Willison highlights EVE Online’s significant undertaking to migrate its 2.4 million lines of code from Stackless Python 2.7 to Python 3, marking a major milestone for a game that has been a long-running “Python at scale” case study since 2003.
  • The migration process will initially use the futurize script, followed by careful manual review of approximately 20,000 code locations where Python 2 and Python 3 exhibit different behaviors (e.g., integer division).
  • While the announcement doesn’t detail how Stackless will be replaced for EVE Online itself, the post notes that for their newer game EVE Frontier, Stackless was replaced in the Carbon engine using their now open-source carbonengine/scheduler library.
  • This migration underscores the immense technical debt and meticulous effort involved in upgrading large, legacy Python applications, especially those built on specialized runtimes, across major language versions.