FWIW as a developer whose worked in both interpreted and compiled languages (but not Python) it's obvious to me that the compiled version will be faster, but it

FWIW as a developer whose worked in both interpreted and compiled languages (but not Python) it's obvious to me that the compiled version will be faster, but it's not obvious that it'd be meaningfully faster. I'd actually expect network latencies to dominate here in many cases. As another commenter mentioned I suspect what's being measured here is the Python startup time rather than performance once things are running. My guess would be a faster to start interpreter (like lua or v8) would rival ht performance, while a slower to start compiled language like the JVM would be as "slow" or slower than httpie.