AIUI part of the trade-off between cycle counting and tracing is ease of implementation vs performance. I also remember reading somewhere (unfortunately the whe

AIUI part of the trade-off between cycle counting and tracing is ease of implementation vs performance. I also remember reading somewhere (unfortunately the where is lost to the mists of my memory) that as the reference implementation simplicity was an explicit goal of CPython, to the extent that there's little optimization done to the bytecode.