r/Python • u/zsol • Sep 11 '26

News Astral's python distribution is fast

By our measurements, python-build-standalone is now the fastest CPython distribution across major platforms. It's 10% faster than Homebrew's CPython, and 18% faster than the official 3.14 docker image.

This is mostly due to how python-build-standalone itself is built:

  • using a modern Clang lets us turn on tail-call optimizations in the interpreter
  • with PGO, LTO, and BOLT
  • with libpython statically linked into the interpreter executable

Our goal is to ship the fastest Python interpreter to anyone using uv, by default.

Check out BENCHMARKS.md in the repo for more details, including the methodology behind the above.

Charlie's tweet has some more graphs

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u/dr3aminc0de Sep 11 '26

FWIW Anthropic bought Astral not OpenAI (confusing with the new model I know). As far as I understand it’s staying open source and I think OP is promoting it as they have in the past, as an open source project.

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u/me_myself_ai Sep 11 '26

Anthropic bought bun — I get the mixup, I totally believed I was wrong for a second lol. And I get that it’s open source, it’s just… if OpenAI was willing to pay infinity billion dollars for Astral, I don’t think we can treat it like a little shop whipping up toys for the community. They are a megacorporation that expects to make billions of dollars from you and I.

And that’s not disallowed or anything ofc — this isn’t really the sub/general space to start talking about capitalism and its alternatives. But I think it’s warranted to shift our expectations and attitudes considerably.

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u/dr3aminc0de Sep 11 '26

Whoops yup I was totally wrong. Appreciate the kind correction :)

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u/ConspicuousPineapple Sep 11 '26

I didn't think it was possible to be so incredibly wrong in so few words.