Is Python About to Get Faster?

'Python 3.11 will bear the fruits of CPython's multi-year effort to make Python a faster programming language,' reports ZDNet.

'Core Python (CPython) developer Mark Shannon shared details about the project to make Python faster at the PyCon 2022 conference this week...'

Last year, Microsoft funded a project for the Python Software Foundation (PSF), led by Python creator Guido van Rossum and Shannon, to make Python twice as fast as the current stable 3.10 series. The vision is to nudge Python towards the performance of C. Microsoft hired van Rossum in 2020 and gave him a free hand to pick any project. At last year's PyCon 2021 conference, he said he 'chose to go back to my roots' and would work on Python's famed lack of performance....

The Faster CPython Project provided some updates about CPython 3.11 performance over the past year. Ahead of PyCon 2022, the project published more results comparing the 3.11 beta preview to 3.10 on dozens of performance metrics, showing that 3.11 was overall 1.25 times faster than 3.10. Shannon is realistic about the project's ability to improve Python performance, but believes the improvements can extend Python's viable use to more virtual machines. 'Python is widely acknowledged as slow. Whilst Python will never attain the performance of low-level languages like C, Fortran, or even Java, we would like it to be competitive with fast implementations of scripting languages, like V8 for Javascript or luajit for lua,' he wrote last year in the Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 659.

'Specifically, we want to achieve these performance goals with CPython to benefit all users of Python including those unable to use PyPy or other alternative virtual machines....'

On the question of a just-in-time (JIT) compiler for Python's performance, Shannon suggested it was not a priority and would likely not arrive until Python 3.13, according to the Python Software Foundation's coverage of the event.... According to the Faster Python implementation plan, CPython 3.12 might gain a 'simple JIT compiler for small regions' that compiles small regions of specialized code, while 3.13 would enhance the compiler to extend the regions for compilation.

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