Hi

I've tried optimizing sympy and it's hard - there is a chance that it uses cython (which will slow things down on pypy) but also the gains were small (up to 2x) and only noticable if you run it for a while (at least few seconds).

SymPy is a bit of an example that while python as a language is not necesarilly slow, since you can make a plan for most parts, it breeds culture of unnecessary meta-programming, tons of copies and dict lookups that makes it REALLY HARD to optimize. ORMs go in the same category

Did you try x64 version of PyPy? x86 version is necessarily much slower (both CPython and PyPy) if your program is long-heavy. SymPy is actually part of benchmark used by PyPy and PyPy should be faster if you compare x64 to x64.

subset of sympy can run with symengine for speedup