Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/930705/

Two members of the Faster
CPython team, which was put together at Microsoft at the behest of Guido
van Rossum to work on major performance improvements for CPython, came
to PyCon 2023 to report on what the
team has been working on—and its plans for the future. PEP 659 (“Specializing
Adaptive Interpreter”) describes the foundation of the current work, some
of which
has already been released as part of Python 3.11. Brandt Bucher, who
gave a
popular talk on structural pattern matching
at last year’s PyCon, was up first, with a talk on what “adaptive” and
“specializing” mean in the context of Python, which we cover here in part
one. Mark Shannon, whose proposed plan
for performance improvements in 2020 was a major impetus for this work,
presented on the past, present, and future of the Python performance
enhancements,
which will be covered in part two.