With JavaScript, these kinds of optimizations in an engine make sense due to the web being limited by it and thus speed is a huge factor. With Python, however, if a Python web framework is “too” slow, I would honestly say the problem is using Python at all for a web server. Python shines beautifully as a (somewhat) cross platform scripting language: file reading and writing, environment variables, simple implementations of basic utilities: sort, length, max, etc that would be cumbersome in C. The move of Python out of this and into practically everything is the issue and then we get led into rabbit holes such as this where since we are using Python, a dynamic scripting language, for things a second year computer science student should know are not “the right jobs for the tool.”

Instead of performance, I’d like to see more effort in portability, package management, and stability for Python because, essentially since it is often enterprise managed, juggling fifteen versions of Python where 3.8.x supports native collection typing annotations but we use 3.7.x, etc. is my biggest complaint. Also up there is pip and just the general mess of dependencies and lack of a lock file. Performance doesn’t even make the list.

This is not to discredit anyone’s work. There is a lot of excellent technical work and research done as discussed in the article. I just think honestly a lot of this effort is wasted on things low on the priority tree of Python.

Agreed, my only use for Python since version 1.6, is portable shell scripting or when sh scripts get too complicated.

Anything beyond that, there are compiled languages with REPL available.

What compiled languages do you have in mind? I suppose technically there are repls for C or Rust or Java, but I wouldn't consider them ideal for interactive programming. Functional programming might do a bit better -- Scala and GHCi work fine interactively. Does Go have a repl?

Might be tripping you up. Very few languages require that implementations be compiled or interpreted. For most languages, having a compiler or interpreter is an implementation decision.

I can implement Python as an interpreter (CPython) or as a compiler (mypyc). I can implement Scheme as an interpreter (Chicken Scheme's csi) or as a compiler (Chicken Scheme's csc). The list goes on: Standard ML's Poly/ML implementation ships a compiler and an interpreter; OCaml ships a compiler and an interpreter.

There are interpreted versions of Go like https://github.com/traefik/yaegi. And there are native-, AOT-compiled versions of Java like GraalVM's native-image.

For most languages there need be no relationship at all between compiler vs interpreter, static vs dynamic, strict or no typing.