There is nothing about the Python language spec (as gleaned from looking at how CPython works) that forces it to be slow or not handle parallelism. In fact the

There is nothing about the Python language spec (as gleaned from looking at how CPython works) that forces it to be slow or not handle parallelism. In fact the addition of the massive amounts of library code and language changes to support async show that Python isn't even immune to preventing added complexity.