Indeed, this is exactly the kind of workload where PyPy historically outperformed CPython by a long shot. I think there have been incremental optimizations in

Indeed, this is exactly the kind of workload where PyPy historically outperformed CPython by a long shot. I think there have been incremental optimizations in the bytecode interpreter for things like this in recent versions, but a JIT is going to be a real game-changer. It will be interesting to see what happens to the PyPy project after this, as well as the HPy C API effort.