“Pyodide is kind of this crazy idea of we should put Python into the browser. And Cloudflare is kind of this crazy idea of we should put the browser into the server. So when you put Python into the browser and you put the browser in the server, that's a funny way of getting Python into the server.”
Talk Python To Me · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
The host had stressed that Python Workers run on Cloudflare's edge nodes, not in the user's browser. Chatham, who maintains Pyodide, gives his one-line explanation of how Python ended up on Cloudflare's servers.
Transcript
…you're giving the exact explanation that I think a lot of our marketing people would give, which is great. Basically, yeah, like you want as little latency as possible for your users, right? So you want to run Python code as close to them as possible. And this is a very great way to do that. Yeah.
…the browser of users like Pyodide can. It runs in the edge nodes of Cloudflare Python happen to be very near the users, right? So I think that's a big difference because it gives you access to an entire platform, like data and queues and all that kind of stuff that we're going to talk about, right?
The way I like to describe it is like Pyodide is kind of this crazy idea of like we should put Python into the browser. And then Cloudflare is kind of this crazy idea of like we should put the browser into the server. And so when you put Python into the browser and you put the browser in the server, that's a funny way of getting Python into the server.
Yeah. As a mathematician, by the transitor property, you click it all together.
It sounds like a crazy idea, though.
Yeah. So let's talk Pyodide just for a minute before we dive in. You know, now that people see where we're going with Pyodide, let's talk about it a little bit because very recently, let's put some one month ago, Hood and JU2 gave a talk at EuroPython, which I thought was really interesting. Python…