> The basics are seriously optimized for typical use cases, take a look at the source code for the dict type Python is well micro-optimized, but the broader ar

> The basics are seriously optimized for typical use cases, take a look at the source code for the dict type Python is well micro-optimized, but the broader architecture of the language and especially the CPython implementation did not put much concern into performance, even for a dynamically typed scripting language. For example, in CPython values of built-in types are still allocated as regular objects and passed by reference; this is atrocious for performance and no amount of micro optimization will suffice to completely bridge the performance gap for tasks which stress this aspect of CPython. By contrast, primitive types in Lua (including PUC Lua, the reference, non-JIT implementation) and JavaScript are passed around internally as scalar values, and the languages were designed with this in mind. Perl is similar to Python in this regard--the language constructs and type systems weren't designed for high primitive operation throughput. Rather, performance considerations were focused on higher level, functional tasks. For example, Perl string objects were designed to support fast concatenation and copy-on-write references, optimizations which pay huge dividends for the tasks for which Perl became popular. Perl can often seem ridiculously fast for naive string munging compared to even compiled languages, yet few people care to defend Perl as a performant language per se.