Comment by OutOfHere
I think perhaps their hope is that eventually Python can get to Go-level if not Rust-level performance if they keep up the optimizations. I do personally believe this to be possible. The motivating example is Julia, which is a high level language with low-level language's performance. After arriving there, developers will care.
I agree, I think that's probably the hope. It's interesting you bring up Julia here because I was just reading the post about the 1.12 release and this comment struck me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45524485
Particularly this part is relevent to the Python discussion:
So that's the question I have right now: what is Python supposed to be? Is it supposed to be the glue language that is easy to use and bind together a system made from other languages? Or is it trying to be what Julia is, a solution to the two language problem. Because it's not clear Julia itself has actually solved that.The reason I bring this up is because there's a lot of "cake having/eating" floating around these types of conversations -- that's it's possible to be all the things, without a healthy discussion of what the tradeoffs are in going that direction, and what that would me mean for the people who are happy with the way things are. These little % gains are all Python is going to achieve without actually asking the developer to sacrifice their development process in some way.