The thing is that there's really little benefit from this. Anything performance critical will be written as a native extension anyway, even if Python speeds up by 10x. If you're doing that, you can lift the GIL anyway and run as much in parallel as you want.
Isn’t that a case of the tail wagging the dog? If Python code were 10x faster, the need to write performance sensitive code in a native extension would be a lot lower. There is a cognitive cost in having to switch between languages and knowing when to switch.
its unfortunate that dynamic interpreted languages with easy uptake for small projects get so popular, and then big, serious things have to eat the performance penalty for years and years. The world could use a language that is 'easy' like python/ruby but fast.
Something like a simplified nim/f# with type inference. So it feels dynamic as you code but isn't really.
Or yes if the normal way to run python was with a top notch jit that would be a big plus.
It's not necessarily C-fast and it is dynamically typed but in the ratio of easiness-to-performance elixir seems to be pretty affable, especially for concurrency stuff. It does tend to balk at some heavier stuff like number-crunching, and that's when I see people start to use Rust NIFs.
That's a pretty big "if". Unfortunately making python a lot faster is difficult because python is such a dynamic language. The pypy folks have done their best, with a respectable amount of success.
The 10x figure I was quoting was from the comment I was responding to. I do think people need to look at what was accomplished by the Strongtalk team and various other projects dealing with dynamic languages including some Lisp implementations. I'm pretty sure Python can be a lot faster, but the legacy code is going to be a big, big problem.
You missed the but the legacy code is going to be a big, big problem. part. If, as other posters point out, those C extensions are not designed to work without the the GIL, then its going to be a 2->3 situation.
Frankly, I honor the Python folks and all their achievements, but I really dislike the language. I mostly am researching another paradigm.
