How a Team of Developers at Microsoft are Helping Make Python Faster

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story

Python is arguably the most popular programming language in the world thanks to machine learning, but its big weakness is performance: it needs high-end hardware, often leans on graphics cards, doesn't run in the browser, like JavaScript, and has almost no story in mobile.

For the past few years, Microsoft has been contributing to Faster Python, a project kicked off by Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2021, shortly after Microsoft hired him as a distinguished engineer, changing his previous plan to retire.

The Python creator wanted the language to be more nimble than the lumbering giant it is. Van Rossum wanted it to be twice as fast but Mark Shannon, one of the key contributors to CPython (or Core Python), penned an implementation plan in 2020 for speeding up CPython by five times. Core Python is the reference implementation of Python that other variants are based on, like data science-focussed Anaconda.

[...] Microsoft hired a team of six engineers along with Van Rossum to deliver the performance improvements via CPython. It's now detailed how it sees those investments translate into benefits for CPython, whose contributors are mostly volunteers - typically skilled engineers who have other jobs - but now benefit from Microsoft's Python hires.

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