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I understand that the Python code is mostly driving faster low-level code, but I wonder how much time is effectively wasted by not using a lower-level language.

From my experience with game engines, it often turns out to be a bad idea (for performance and maintainability) to mix C/C++ and Lua or C#.

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I would argue that there are performance *benefits* for a developer in running python code, due to how programs are run in python(Jupyter notebooks) you basically can change program on the fly, and not recompile and restart it, as you would do with compiled languages. And yeah, CPU does very very little in modern DL workloads and it is commonplace for CPU python code to be jitted and vectorized, so performance difference isn't as large as you would think.

This is very true!

Another benefit to interactivity is when exploring/using bad code. In academia, you'll often be importing the worst and least-well-documented code you've ever seen.

Being able to interactively experiment with someones 500-line 0-documentation function is often a better path to understanding than directly reading the code.

Doesn’t really matter for large batch/large model training on GPUs that don’t need much coordination.

But Python speed is one of the main motivations for a JS/TS based ML lib I’m working on: https://github.com/facebookresearch/shumai

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