VWWHFSfQ, you may already know this, but: I recommend this talk by Armin Ronacher (Flask creator) on how Python's implementation internals contribute to the difficulties of making Python faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=qCGofLIzX6g

One case study Ronacher gets into is the torturous path taken through the Python interpreter (runtime?) when you evaluate `__add__`. Fascinating stuff.

Python is fast enough for a whole set of problems AND it is a pretty, easy to read and write language. I do think it can probably hit pause on adding more syntax but at least everything it adds is backwards compatible. You won’t be writing a 3D FPS game engine in Python but you definitely can do a whole lot of real time data processing, batch processing, scientific computing, web and native applications, etc. before you need to start considering a faster interpreter.

If your only metric for a language is speed then nothing really beats hand crafted assembly. All this memory safety at runtime is just overhead. If you also consider language ergonomics, Python suddenly is not a bad choice at all.

The JIT will improve - you can also use PyPy to get speedups on programs that don't use a ton of C extensions.

Also, free-threading is coming so we'll have threads soon.

I don't know if Python can every really be fast as by design, objects are scattered all over memoryand even things like iterating a list, you're chasing pointers to PyObject all over the place - it's just not cache friendly.

I think if you want python but fast then Mojo is your only hope.

EDIT: yes and there’s pypy as well as pointed out below. Basically you gotta use an alternative python implementation of some kind.