Runtimes

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. ...