a) that surprises me, because in my short experience with it, I found that PyPy is more about simpler idioms if you are aiming for performance, a bit C-ish in style
b) it's been something like... 3 years (I think) since I last used PyPy for some serious performance testing of code. And even then it was a horrible proof of concept that barely ran, but helped me point out that "hey, we optimized it to 3.5x times faster with CPython and PyPy is getting to 4.5x over the original code, but it's throwing a thousand errors and warnings on screen and we can't be sure it'll work in production"[0].
Probably things have changed a bit on the PyPy side, though I don't think RPython has changed much in concept.
Also I see I never got to explain the pythonic note on my previous comment: basically, whatever "pythonic" means to the team. In general I try to go for the definition that is "it's easy to read and understand what's going on with the code, and provides easy-to-use interfaces for programmers". Not an easy to do thing, but at least trying to do it helps a lot.
[0] the job was that there was a large program that was bottlenecking a process in a lab, and somebody threw the idea of "oh we should use pypy because it'll surely make things run faster". And then it was my responsibility to pick that skeleton up and take care of it.
Oh and the code was pretty inefficient to begin with, which is why we got to speed it up so much without even going into C. A quick test with Cython put it in the 7-10x range of speedups, but the client wasn't willing to handle that, so they just kept it in CPython.
