Dropbox: How we rolled out one of the largest Python 3 migrations ever

Dropbox is one of the most popular desktop applications in the world: You can install it today on Windows, macOS, and some flavors of Linux. What you may not know is that much of the application is written using Python. In fact, Drew’s very first lines of code for Dropbox were written in Python for Windows using venerable libraries such as pywin32.

Though we’ve relied on Python 2 for many years (most recently, we used Python 2.7), we began moving to Python 3 back in 2015. This transition is now complete: If you’re using Dropbox today, the application is powered by a Dropbox-customized variant of Python 3.5. This post is the first in a series that explores how we planned, executed, and rolled out one of the largest Python 3 migrations ever.

Exciting new features Python 3 has seen rapid innovation. Apart from the (very) long list of general improvements (e.g. the str vs bytes rationalization), a few specific features caught our eye: Type annotation syntax: Our codebase is quite large, so the ability to use type annotations has been important to developer productivity. We’re big fans of MyPy here at Dropbox, so the ability to natively support type annotations is naturally appealing to us.

Coroutine function syntax: We rely heavily on threading and message-passing—through variants of the Actor pattern and by using Futures—to build many of our features. The asyncio project and its async/await syntax could sometimes remove the need for callbacks, leading to cleaner code.

Source: dropbox.com