Over the last month or so, there has been a good bit of news
surrounding the idea of increasing the performance of the CPython
interpreter. At the 2021
Python Language Summit in mid-May, Guido van Rossum announced
that he and a small team are being funded by Microsoft to work with the
community on getting performance improvements upstream into the
interpreter—crucially, without breaking the C API so that the ecosystem of
Python extensions (e.g. NumPy) continue to
work. Another talk at
the summit looked
at Cinder, which is a performance-oriented CPython fork that is used in
production at Instagram. Cinder was recently released as open-source
software, as was another
project to speed up CPython that originated at Dropbox: Pyston.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Making CPython faster