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Comment by spacechild1 | Hacker News Reader

> "remember that CPython is already written in C"

What is this supposed to say? Most scripting language interpreters are written in low level languages (or assembly), but that alone doesn't say anything about the performance of the language itself.

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I think they mean that a lot of runtime of any benchmark is going to be spent in the C bits of the standard library, and therefore not subject to the JIT. Only the glue code and the bookkeeping or whatnot that the benchmark introduces would be improved by the JIT. This reduces the impact that the JIT can make.

This means, that a lot of python libraries like polars or tensorflow are written not in python.

So python programs, that already spend most of its cpu time running these libraries code, won't see much of an impact.

Isn't the point that if pure Python was faster they wouldn't need to be written in other [compiled] languages? Having dealt with Cython it's not bad, but if I could write more of my code in native Python my development experience would be a lot simpler.

Granted we're still very far from that and probably won't ever reach it, but there definitely seems to be a lot of progress.

Since Nim compiles to C, a middle step worth being aware of is Nim + nimporter which isn't anywhere near "just python" but is (maybe?) closer than "compile a C binary and call it from python".

Or maybe it's just syntactic sugar around that. But sugar can be nice.

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