Very happy to see that these issues are getting attention now. I think that the Python language being so centered on one implementation is a long-term threat to

Very happy to see that these issues are getting attention now. I think that the Python language being so centered on one implementation is a long-term threat to its success. Web servers, command-line programs, and embedded devices have different requirements: high post-warmup throughput, fast startup, low memory usage. They aren't necessarily best served by the same implementation. If this project succeeds in replacing Python's C API with something that doesn't expose implementation details, such as whether the implementation uses reference counting, that could make it easier both to maintain alternative implementations, and to experiment with new techniques in CPython.