Microsoft is bankrolling some efforts to improve Python performance. They even hired Guido for that.
(Disclosure: I'm a very minor volunteer contributor to that effort. I have a series of pull requests in the works that will improve runtime performance by about 1% across the board. I also have some more specialised improvements to memory.)
(Disclosure: I'm a very minor volunteer contributor to that effort. I have a series of pull requests in the works that will improve runtime performance by about 1% across the board. I also have some more specialised improvements to memory.)