Why Python Was Slow and How It's Getting Faster: A Look at Recent Optimizations

Due to its dynamic nature, Python is well known to be very slow for trivial computations. However, is that still true?

In this talk I will discuss the implementation details of the interpreter which made it extremely slow for tasks such as function calls and binary operator execution (operations such as +, -, /, *). I will use microbenchmarks to show how has Python's performance improved over the last few releases in these areas and I will explain the changes introduced in the interpreter to fix these performance issues.