Facebook has released Cinder, used internally in Instagram to
improve Python performance, while another faster Python, called
Pyston, has released version 2.2 and made the project open source
(again).
Python is the world's second most popular programming language
(after JavaScript) according to some
surveys;
but it is by no means the fastest. A glance at
benchmarks
tells us that Python 3 computation is often many times slower than
compiled languages like C and Go, or JIT (Just-in-Time) compiled
languages like Java and JavaScript.
One reason is that the official implementation of Python, called
CPython, is an interpreted, dynamic language, and its creator Guido
Van Rossum has resisted optimising it for performance, saying in
2014
that "Python is about having the simplest, dumbest compiler
imaginable, and the official runtime semantics actively discourage
cleverness in the compiler like parallelizing loops or turning
recursion into loops."