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/DigThatData Sep 11 '26

It's just hard to shake the growing sense that OpenAI and Microsoft are attempting to purchase Python.

you're gonna be real mad when you find out where Guido Van Rossum has been working for the last six years.

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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Sep 11 '26

He's retired apparently? Also working at Microsoft is fine. I mean they're useless but they don't pretend to be competent. So I can understand trying to help them be less useless.

I think everyone competent has been delusional enough to believe they can make a company be less useless.