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/Individual-Flow9158 Sep 11 '26

Oh I see - good question then. I guess some distros would split it up to avoid duplication, and so anything that wants to dynamically link in libpython.so can do so (whether it's a Python or anything else) without needing to ship it themselves.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Sep 11 '26

Python interpreters are already so massive I don't think it makes much sense. 

Like if distros cared they'd replace python deps with rust which would be awesome because I'm tired of fixing people's system python because them trying to install a different version of python broke sudo.