Comment by benrutter

I work in Python every day and think about this a lot - people really don't seem worried about its performance. Sure people want it to be faster, but I don't see very many people changing their language choice for a faster language, despite Python being a lot slower than most alternatives.

If I think about where I see python being used though, this kind of makes sense, the two big use cases are:

- Web APIs and backends, where for the most part either the network or the database is the bottleneck

- Data science work, where for the most part, work exists in libraries like polars, pytorch etc that ship the main work out to other languages.

So from that perspective, although we'd all like python do be faster, it's speed isn't the bottleneck in the use cases where its popular (that's probably also the reason why we don't see Python getting used in other speed critical places).

That's a really different story to JavaScript, which doesn't have a handy CFFI or otherwise you can just reach out to. There are a lot of cases where JavaScript speed improving would speed up the reactivity of a web app, even now.

I'm not arguing against a faster CPython - I'd love one! But I think there's a clear reason why it hasn't been prioritised historically in the way JavaScript's performance has.