Depending on how you ask, Python consistently ranks among the top 5 programming languages in use today. It is a dynamic, interpreted language with powerful support for deep introspection and a rich ecosystem of native extensions, maintained for free by a small team of (mostly) volunteers. All of these factors contribute to Python’s widespread popularity and ease-of-use, but also to the incredible challenges involved in successfully optimizing it (which is why Python also consistently ranks among the slowest programming languages in use today).

However, the situation is improving. CPython (the most widely used implementation of Python) is getting faster every week, in large part due to a coordinated effort by companies and individuals around the world. This talk will introduce you to some of the work that has already been done to improve CPython’s performance in recent years, a few of the exciting projects that are currently being developed for even higher tiers of optimization in CPython 3.13 and beyond, and how you can get involved in speeding up every Python process on the planet.

Bio

Brandt Bucher is a Python core developer currently working at Microsoft on a team tasked with improving the speed of the CPython interpreter. He has been officially involved in CPython development for over five years now, and has improved its performance, stability, and expressiveness in a variety of ways. In addition to his ongoing contributions as part of the “Faster CPython” project in the 3.11-3.14 release cycles (including a new just-in-time compiler), he also helped design and lead the implementation of structural pattern matching, a major new feature of Python 3.10.