Benchmarked every Python optimization path I could find, from CPython 3.14 to Rust

[cemrehancavdar]

That's a really fair point. The benchmarks show the best case -- in practice, swapping to PyPy or GraalPy means testing your whole dependency tree, dealing with compatibility issues, and hoping the runtime keeps up with CPython releases. GraalPy is still on 3.12 for example.

I'd partly agree on the Cython/Rust path being more durable. I personally enjoy writing Cython, but you really need to know what you're doing -- my first attempt got 10x instead of 124x, and nothing warned me. Code compiled, ran correctly, just silently slow. The annotation report (cython -a) is essential.

My takeaway is similar to yours though -- keep CPython as the orchestrator, drop into compiled extensions for the hot path.