Microsoft Funds a Team with Guido van Rossum to Double the Speed of Python

ZDNet reports:
Guido van Rossum, who created popular programming language Python 30 years ago, has outlined his ambitions to make it twice as fast — addressing a key weakness of Python compared to faster languages like C++.

Speed in Core Python (CPython) is one of the reasons why other implementations have emerged, such as Pyston.... In a contribution to the U.S. PyCon Language Summit this week, van Rossum posted a document on Microsoft-owned GitHub, first spotted by The Register, detailing some of his ambitions to make Python a faster language, promising to double its speed in Python 3.11 — one of three Python branches that will emerge next year in a pre-alpha release... van Rossum was 'given freedom to pick a project' at Microsoft and adds that he 'chose to go back to my roots'.

'This is Microsoft's way of giving back to Python,' writes van Rossum... According to van Rossum, Microsoft has funded a small Python team to 'take charge of performance improvements' in the interpreted language...

He says that the main beneficiaries of upcoming changes to Python will be those running 'CPU-intensive pure Python code' and users of websites with built-in Python.

The Register notes that the faster CPython project 'has a GitHub repository which includes a fork of CPython as well as an issue tracker for ideas and tools for analysing performance.'

'According to Van Rossum, there will be 'no long-lived forks/branches, no surprise 6,000 line pull requests,' and everything will be open source.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.