Python

Python is the most popular programming language in the world, and one of the slowest in wide production use. That combination should be catnip for anyone building a faster runtime — and for fifteen years, people have. There is a version of Python with a tracing JIT that is genuinely several times faster. There are compilers that turn it into native code. There are ports to the JVM and the .NET CLR. Big companies have funded forks. And after all of it, the interpreter almost everyone actually runs is still plain CPython. ...

I came across pon, a project that sets out to be “the bun/v8 of Python”: a from-scratch native compiler and runtime for Python 3.14, written in Rust, with no interpreter and no bytecode. The pitch is ambitious enough to be worth taking seriously — and the repository is unusual in another way. It was built in about a week: 475 commits from a single author between June 30 and July 7, with an AGENTS.md file and conventional-commit discipline that make it fairly clear the bulk was produced with AI coding agents. ...

This is Part 2 of a series. Read Part 1: Pandas vs Polars in Production - Performance Comparison for the background on the Polars migration. After migrating from Pandas to Polars, CPU performance improved dramatically—but a memory problem persisted. Despite extensive debugging, I couldn’t identify the root cause. So I made a pragmatic decision: architect around it. This is the story of splitting a monolithic Python application into a Go orchestration service with Python workers, not because I fully understood the problem, but because I needed production to be stable. ...

The Problem While working on a freelance project, I needed to generate PDF reports from Excel files. The challenge? The Excel files were wide and long. Here we see a sample Excel file around 15 columns containing employee data like ID, name, email, department, job title, hire date, salary, and more. I used LibreOffice’s CLI utility convert-to in headless mode to convert the files. The conversion worked, but the result was unusable: ...