But it's not like every tiny optimization will turn the runtime into unreadable soup. But that's been the defense every time someone proposes adding some extrem

But it's not like every tiny optimization will turn the runtime into unreadable soup. But that's been the defense every time someone proposes adding some extremely basic optimizations [0]; these things aren't difficult and any VM engineer will understand them. And even if not, it's not that that hard to learn about basic method caches. Write a few blog posts, or a giant block comment. Stuff's not arcane magic, it's the foundation of any PL implementation these days. There are also a lot of programming language who don't bother touching Python because the team doesn't seem to care about runtime performance as their responsibility. There's a lot of excellent talent out there, and they're mostly being denied and shot down. [0] https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/ https://lwn.net/Articles/754163/