Stefan Marr, ICFP/SPLASH 2025:
Over the past years, two major players invested into the future of Python. Microsoft's Faster CPython team has pushed ahead with impressive performance improvements for the CPython interpreter, which has gotten at least 2x faster since Python 3.9. They also have a baseline JIT compiler for CPython, too. At the same time, Meta has worked hard on making free-threaded Python a reality to bring classic shared-memory multithreading to Python, without being limited by the still standard Global Interpreter Lock, which prevents true parallelism.
Both projects deliver major improvements to Python and the wider ecosystem. So, it's all great, or is it?
