Python 3 Support

@ankenyr, I’d like to open up a discussion about python3 support. As the countdown clock points out, this is a decision we’ll need to confront at some point. In an effort to get this dialog started, I submitted a PR to add future imports to all of the python files we have. I’ll be following the recommendations here and here. One item of note that the PR brings up is this:

from __future__ import absolute_import
from __future__ import division
from __future__ import print_function
from __future__ import unicode_literals

This is the big key to writing python2.7/3 compatible code. It isn’t the whole story, but it’s the first part of it. The big question I have is how long should we support python2.7? Supporting only 3.5 and up will let us do some things that would give us some perf gains. Supporting both might slow things down a little. So supporting both isn’t without a cost. Thoughts?

[ankenyr]

Yup, once we can move internally over to python 3 I expect we will drop 2.7. Does that sound fine to you and anyone else? Would it be preferred if I give some head notice before a change to pure python 3?

[sneakywombat]

sounds good to me.