Well, GraalPython is a Python JIT compiler which can exploit dynamically determined types, and it advertises 4.3x faster, so it's possible to do drastically bet

Well, GraalPython is a Python JIT compiler which can exploit dynamically determined types, and it advertises 4.3x faster, so it's possible to do drastically better than a few percent. I think that's state of the art but might be wrong. That's for this benchmark: https://pyperformance.readthedocs.io/ https://pyperformance.readthedocs.io/ Note that this is with a relatively small investment as these things go, the GraalPython team is about ~3 people I guess, looking at the GH repo. It's an independent implementation so most of the work went into being compatible with Python including native extensions (the hard part). But this speedup depends a lot on what you're doing. Some types of code can go much faster. Others will be slower even than CPython, for example if you want to sandbox the native code extensions.